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SIGHTS AND SENSATIONS 



IN 



FRANCE, GERMANY, AND 
SWITZERLAND. 



SIGHTS AND SENSATIONS 



* „\' 



FRANCE, GERMANY, AND SWITZERLAND; 



OR, EXPERIENCES OF 



AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 



j 


THE BUBBLES OF CHAMPAGNE, 


/ 


HOMBOURG AND BADEN-BADEN, 


/ 


A TRAMP IN THE BERNESE OBEELAND, 


J 


THE FOUNDLING HOSPITAL OF PARIS, 


V 


A CHAMBER OF HORRORS, 


U^ 

¥ ■ 


THE CLOSERIE DE LILAS, 


THE QU ARTIER LATIN, 

ETC., ETC., ETC. 


y 




By EDWARD GOULD BUFFUM, 

AUTHOR OF "SIX MONTHS IN THE GOLD MINES," ETC., ETC. 



NEW YORK: 

HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, 

FRANKLIN SQUARE. 
1869. 










Entered, according to Act of Congress, In the year 1869, by 

HARPER & BROTHERS, 

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the 

Southern District of New York. 






PEE FACE. 



TT is believed that the name of the author of 
these pages will require no introduction to 
a very wide circle of readers both at home and 
abroad — in New York, where he began his 
journalistic career; on the Pacific coast, with 
whose early fortunes he was, as editor, ex- 
plorer, and legislator, intimately and honor- 
ably associated ; in the capitals of Western Eu- 
rope, where he passed the last nine or ten years 
of his life as chief correspondent of a leading 
New York ne^vspaper. In all these places Ed- 
ward Gould Buffuni had a multitude of friends 
who, on the announcement of his demise in 
Paris some months ago, sincerely mourned the 
untimely taking-off of one who had endeared 
himself by every engaging quality of head and 
heart, and given promise, by many creditable 



VI PREFACE. 

performances, of a brilliant and successful lit- 
erary career. For those, however, who did not 
personally know him, it will not be amiss to 
premise a few words by way of biography and 
characterization — words which the fraternal 
hand that writes them will endeavor not to 
color beyond the modesty of nature. 

My brother, Edward Gould Buffum, was 
born at Smithfield, Rhode Island, and came of 
an ancient Quaker family who, about the mid- 
dle of the 17th century, fled from the persecu- 
tions of the Puritans of Salem, and sought shel- 
ter and protection in " Providence Plantations." 
His mother, a superior and remarkably hand- 
some woman, belonged to the Gould family of 
Newport. His father was Arnold Buffum, a 
man of singular purity and elevation of char- 
acter, who earned, by good works, the title of 
" the Quaker philanthropist," and by a living, 
glowing enthusiasm, revealed his affiliation 
with the spiritual line of George Fox. 

When Edward was a mere boy, the family 
removed to the Great West, and he was left 
to be educated under the care of some rela- 



PREFACE. VU 

tives in Eliode Island at one of the Quaker 
schools near Providence. If this were the fit- 
ting place to enter into an analysis of the in- 
fluences which went to shape his character, 
I should be compelled to say that, for a na- 
ture of his mould, the circumstances of his 
nurturing and education were not altogether 
favorable. Among the sect of Friends, it is 
too frequently the case that the spiritual fires 
have long ago gone out, leaving behind only 
the white ashes and embers of a dead formal- 
ism. The sort of Quaker-Puritanism amid 
which the boy's lines were cast, frequently 
makes strong and admirable characters ; but 
very often, also, its morbid culture of what it 
calls " conscience," its subjection of all man- 
hood to an abstraction which it names " duty," 
result in drying up the very sap and springs 
of humanity, and leave a class of atrophied 
men and women, who, under the cloak of this 
same " conscience " and " duty," practice a 
frigid selfishness and a dreary cynicism. 

But this is not the place to enter upon any 
such analysis : and so it may suffice to say that, 



Vlll PKEFACE. 

after many struggles, the boy's bold and spon- 
taneous individuality finally freed itself from 
these trammels, and, at about the age of nine- 
teen, he came to New York to begin life for 
himself. 

He had early exhibited an aptitude for lit- 
erary pursuits, and, soon after his arrival in 
this city, he entered the profession of journal- 
ism. It is stated of him in a sketch in a prom- 
inent newspaper with which he formed his 
first connection, that, " as a writer, he at once 
displayed ability of a high order." He con- 
tinued his newspaper employment until the 
breaking out of the Mexican War, when he 
joined Colonel Stevenson's regiment (1st N. 
Y. Vols.), with which he went to California 
as a lieutenant. He served with his command 
on the Pacific coast of Mexico until the close 
of the war, and was discharged in 1848, short- 
ly after the discovery of gold in California. 
This event, which has had so important a bear- 
ing both on the prosperity of our own country 
and on the exchanges of the world, lured his 
adventurous spirit to the new-found El Dora- 



PREFACE. IX 

do, and lie spent the winter of 1848-9 in tlie 
mining region, taking an active part in push- 
ing explorations for the precious metal. The 
fruits of his observations he subsequently em- 
bodied in an interesting and valuable work, 
the first of its kind, entitled " Six Months in 
the Gold Mines." Soon after he became the 
editor-in-chief of the Alia- California newspa- 
per, in which position he continued for several 
years. He was elected a member of the Legis- 
lature from San Francisco, and was a promi- 
nent candidate for the Speakership of the 
House. In the Legislature it is recorded of 
him that he displayed great ability as a de- 
bater, and a thorough knowledge of the wants 
of the new community. In 1858 he went to 
Europe, and finally settled himself in Paris as 
head of a bureau of correspondence, in which 
arduous employment he continued up to the 
time of his death, which occurred a few months 
since, at the age of forty-one. 

This brief narrative will suffice to show 
that the author of these pages was a busy 

man ; and justice demands that the sketches 

1^ 



X PREFACE. 

which compose this little posthumous volume 
be judged accordingly. The " Sights " and 
the "Sensations" he here depicts were writ- 
ten cur rente calamo^ in the midst of occupa- 
tions which taxed all his time, and* required 
his constant care and closest attention. It is 
possible, therefore, that they may not have all 
the polish which a man of leisure would be- 
stow on the productions of his pen. It will 
be found, however, that they possess a special 
value and charm, which they owe as much to 
the writer's individual cast of mind as to his 
long training and experience as a journalist. 
The author was a man who had seen a great 
deal of life — who had seen a great deal and 
felt a great deal — for he had somewhat of 
that spirit which Tennyson embodies in his 
"Ulysses:" 

" I can not rest from travel : I will drink 
Life to tlie lees." 

Yet, withal, he was a man of gentleness, 
whom experience of the world had never 
soured ; so that he had a healthy love of see- 
ing, and, with his quick and broad sympathies, 



PREFACE. XI 

the capacity of observing and of describing 
what lie observed, without excess of senti- 
mentality on the one hand, or of stoicism on 
the other. His descriptions, in fact, are pure, 
pellucid, simple, direct, and have the charm 
which these qualities possess for all persons of 
unvitiated taste. In addition to this, his long 
practice as a newspaper writer taught him a 
style at once concise and forcible, straightfor- 
ward, yet not unpicturesque ; and his pages 
are always luminous, vivacious, crisp, and en- 
tertaining. 

It may not be inappropriate for me to add 
that the papers which compose this book form 
a small part of a multifarious and extended 
series of letters, sketches, studies, etc., produced 
by my brother^ It is j)ossible that, in this vo- 
luminous mass, there may be other writings 
worthier of going before the public; but I 
have not sought for them. This work not 
having had the advantage of the author's re- 
vision, I have gone so far as to execute such 
indispensable editorial labor as the book re- 
quired for publication. It will be proper for 



xu 



PREFACE. 



me to add that two of the sketches have al- 
ready appeared in magazine form — that on 
Hombourg (under the title of "Eien Ne Va 
Plus "), in the Galaxy^ and that on the Mont 
Oenis Tunnel, in the London Fortniglitly Re- 
vieio ; the last named — a memorial of adven- 
ture in Savoy — has been republished recently 
by several French and Italian journals. 

But enough — perhaps more than enough- 
has been said by way of introduction^ and it 
only remains to commit the book to the indul- 
gence of the reader^ 

William A. Buffum. 

New York, May 19th, 1869. 




CONTENTS 



CHAPTER I. 

THE BUBBLES OP CHAMPAGNE. 

A Week in the Champagne District. — How Champagne Wine is made 
and prepared for Market. — Cost of a Bottle of Champagne. — In- 
voice Prices. — Varieties of Wine. — The Champagne Kings. — The 
Widow Chcquot. — The Wine Cellars. — The Vintage. — Romance 
and Reality. — The pretty Champenoises. — Practical Information. 
— The Cathedral of Reims. — Equal and Exact Justice Page 19 

CHAPTER II. 

TRENTE ET QUARANTE AT HOMBOURG. 

The Baths of Hombourg. — Hombourg and its Surroundings. — The In- 
ducement to Visitors. — The great Gaming-hell of Europe. — The 
Kursaal. — The Game of "Roulette." — My early Experiences. — 
"Systems," and an Exposure of their Fallacy. — The Scene at the 
Tables. — The Rouge-et-noir. — Large Winnings. — The Countess 
Kisselef. — Tricks of Sharpers. — Profits of the Games 44 

CHAPTER III. 

A TRAMP IN THE BERNESE OBERLAND. 

From Zurich to Altorf. — The Falls of the Rhine. — Zurich and its 
Surroundings. — Vagabonds. — My Companion.— Horgen. — Outfit 
and Travelling-dress.— Knapsacks and Gibicieres.—The Hill above 
Horgen. — An unwarrantable Intrusion. — The *' Falken" at Zug. — 
Gretchen and her Sympathy. — Arth. — Guides and Commission- 
naires. — The Ascent of theRigi.— Dismal Weather. — TheKlosterli. 



XIV CONTENTS. 

— The Rigi StafFel. — '* View" from our Windows. — The Summit 
of the Rigi, and the View from there. — DoAvn toWeggis. — Lucerne. 
— The Lake of Lucerne. — Fluellen. — Altorf. — From Altorf to Mei- 
ringen. — Our pedestrian Excursion fairly commenced. — Unpropi- 
tious Circumstances. — Beggars in Switzerland. — The Devil's Bridge. 
— Realp. — The Road to the Furca. — View from the mountain Sum- 
mit. — Necessary Precautions. — The Glacier du Rhone. — A pedes- 
trian Wed ding- tour. — The Grimsel. — The Valley of the Aare. — 
The Falls of Handeck. — From Meiringen to Interlaken. — A Differ- 
ence of Opinion, and its Results. — Warer and I separate. — A mag- 
nificent View. — The Glacier of Rosenlaui. — The Alpenhorn. — 
Warer and I meet again. — Grindelwald. — Ascent of the Glacier. — 
An unpleasant Predicament. — The i^valanches. — The Jungfrau. — 
How to "share" a Mule. — Lauterbrunnen. — Termination of our 
Trip. — My Companion Warer Page 75 

CHAPTER IV. 

IN " MONT CENIS" TUNNEL — THROUGH THE HEART OF THE ALPS. 

The great engineering Work of the Century. — A Journey into the 
" Bowels of the Earth." — San Michel. — The Village of Fourneaux, 
and its People. — Its beautiful Surroundings.— History of the En- 
terprise. — Anticipated Difficulties and Obstacles. — Map of the Tun- 
nel and its Vicinity. — The motive Power. — Air pressed into the 
Service. — The Operations commenced. — My Visit to the Tunnel. 
— Preparations for entering. — In the "Bowels of the Earth." — 
Darkness visible. — Breathing becomes difficult. — A Halt and Rest. 
— Among the Workmen. — An unpleasant Predicament. — The 
Blast. — The "Advanced Gallery." — The Construction and Action 
of the perforating Machines. — The Work performed by them. — 
First Sight of the "Aflfusto." — Immense Wear and Tear of 
Material. — Accidents. — Termination and Success of the Enter- 
prise 116 

CHAPTER V. 

THE QUARTIER LATIN. 

My Residence and Mode of Life. — Occupations of Women in Paris. — 
Ladies taking the Degrees of " Bachelor " of Arts and Letters. — 
A Lady attempting to obtain a medical Diploma. — Quiet Life of my 
Concierge. — My Neighbor, little Aglae, the Flower-maker.... . 144 



CONTENTS. XV 

CHAPTER VI. 

WHAT THE PARISIANS EAT. 

Snail-eating.— History and Habits of the Snail.— Cost of living in 
Paris. — Cheap Restaurants. — Horse-eating. — Bill of Fare of a 
HorsQ-dinner.— Tables d'hote.— First-class Restaurants.— Cre- 
meries. — " Etablissements de Bouillon." — How the Parisian Poor 
furnish their Tables...,, Page 152 

CHAPTER VII. 

THE HOSPITALS OF PARIS. 

Hospital Lariboisiere.— The Physician's Visit.— The surgical Wards. 
—The Operating-room.— Medical Students.— Chassaignac's Oper- 
ations with the "Ecraseur" ' 168 

CHAPTER VIII. 

THE CLOSERIE DE LILAS. 

Students and Etudiantes. — " Grisettes " of the Past and Present. — 
The Society at the "Closerie." — The male and female Dancers. — 
Remarkable Terpsichorean Gymnastics. — The Cancan. — Order and 
Propriety 181 

CHAPTER IX. 

. THE FOUNDLING HOSPITAL OF PARIS. 

How Foundlings are taken in and done for. — Visit to the Hospital. — 
The new-born Babies. — The Infirmaries. — How the Foundlings 
are cared for. — How they become Foundlings. — Their Mothers. — 
A grave moral and social Question. — Legitimate and illegitimate 
Births in Paris 187 



CHAPTER X. 

A CHAMBER OF HORRORS. 

The dissecting-rooms at Clamart. — The "Salle de Reception." — The 
"Subjects." — Food for Meditation 195 



XVI CONTEI^TS. 



CHAPTER XI. 

THE "SPECIALITE DE PUMPKIN PIE." 

A Mystery to the uninitiated. — "Thin Magpie" an American 
Dish Page 200 

CHAPTER XII. 

WHAT AND HOW MUCH THE PARISIANS DRINK. 

Drunkenness. — Wine - drinking. — ' ' The Octroi " Duty. —Extensive 
Establishments. —Parisian Cafes.— American Drinks.— Marchands 
de Vin. — Absinthe-drinking. — " A little Absinthe, just to give an 
Appetite."— Composition of Absinthe, and its fearful Effects. 204 

CHAPTER XIII. 

A FLYING TRIP IN THE COUNTRY. 

Orleans and "the Maid." — Chambord. — Blois. — Amboise, — Plessis 
les Tours. — A curious Village. — Houses cut in the solid Rock. — 
Chinon. — Angers. — The Castle of Bluebeard. — Down the Loire. 
—Brittany 216 

CHAPTER XIV. 

PARISIAN THEATRES. 

Annoyances. — The " Claque." — Its Origin and Object. — The Censor- 
ship. — The Acting. — Specialities of different Theatres 230 

CHAPTER XV. 

DISTINGUISHED NEGROES. 

Confused Ideas of America. — One of my Countrymen. — No Prejudice 
against Color 236 

CHAPTER XVI. 

LEARNED INSTITUTIONS AND LECTURES. 

Distinguished Lecturers. — Opportunities for the Gratification of all 
Tastes.— Programme of the Courses 243 



CONTENTS. XVll 

CHAPTER XVII. 

"down among the dead men." 

The Catacombs of Paris. — A Visit to them. — Dismal Places. — Miles 
of Skulls and Bones. — The Abode of the Dead. — An agreeable 
Situation. — Accidents , Page 248 

CHAPTER XVIII. 

THE CHIFFONNIERS OF PARIS. 

Their Mode of Life, and what they find. — The " Hasard de la Four- 
chette." — Dilapidated Lorettes. — Objects found in the Streets and 
public Carriages, — Honesty of the Chiffonniers. — An independent 
Rag-picker. — The Ravageurs 261 

CHAPTER XIX. 

VISIT TO THE CHAPEL OP THE TUILERIES. 

The Imperial Chapel. — The Emperor and Empress at their Devo- 
tions. — The Emperor.^ — The Empress 272 

CHAPTER XX. 

THE CEMETERY OF PERE LA CHAISE. 

A real "City of the Dead."— The Jewish Inclosure. — Tomb of Ra- 
chel. — Defacing Monuments. — Abelard and Heloise. — The Grave 
of Marshal Ney. — The Artist's Corner. — Vandael, theElower-paint- 
er. — Singular Inscriptions. — The common Graves. — How the Dead 
are buried, and what it costs. — The Aristocracy and Democracy of 
Death. — "Poor little Hunchback." — Respect for the Dead. — 
The "Jour des Morts." — Mortuary Statistics of Paris 279 

CHAPTER XXL 

RELIGIOUS FREEDOM IN FRANCE. 

The Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish Establishments. — The Parisian 
Catholic Churches.— The "Eglise des Petits Peres."— The Statue 
of St. Peter.— The "Ex Votos."— The Tableau of "Indulgen- 
ces" 297 



xviii 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER XXII. 

EOUEN AND ITS ROMANTIC REMINISCENCES. 

First Impressions. — Tlie Rouen of To-day. — The Cathedral of Notre 
Dame. — St. Christopher and his History, — St. Ouen. — A curi- 
ous Book. — William the Conqueror. — "His Mark." — The Heart 
of Richard Coeur de Lion. — The Spot where Joan of Arc was 
burnt Page 303 




AN AMEEICAN JOUEISTALIST 
IN EUKOPE. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE BUBBLES OF CHAMPAGNE. 

A Week in the Champagne District. — How Champagne Wine is made 
and prepared for Market. — Cost of a Bottle of Champagne. — In- 
voice Prices.— Varieties of Wine.— The Champagne Kings.— The 
Widow Clicquot.— The Wine Cellars.— The Vintage.— Eomance 
and Eeality. — The pretty Champenoises. — Practical Information. 
— The Cathedral of Eeims. — Equal and exact Justice. 

A T the distance of a brief five hours' ride from 
■^-^ Paris lies Eeims, the commercial capital of the 
Champagne wine district, and the centre of the ter- 
ritory which produces the Paradisiacal beverage. 
Around and near it, on the banks of the sluggish 
Marne, and upon the neighboring hillsides, embosomed 
among vines, are the villages of Ay, Yerzenay, Bouzy, 
and others, with names familiar as household words. 
Some of these names may possibly bring to mind un- 
pleasant recollections — retrospective headaches and 
dimness of vision ; but oftener, it is to be hoped, sweet 
remembrances of social enjoyment — of sparkling wit. 



20 AN AMERICAN JOURNi^LIST IN EUROPE. 

and song, and jollity. One or, indeed, both of these 
effects may also be produced by a sight of the names 
which meet the eye in the queer streets of this quaint 
old town — Eugene Clicquot, De St. Marceaux, Charles 
Heidseick, Piper, and Veuve Clicquot ! Though for- 
eigners and strangers to us and to our land, they are, 
like the faces of old friends, well known, and their 
manufactures, at least, are highly esteemed among 
us. 

I spent a week at Eeims — pronounced Ranee — 
in the early. part of October, and shall not soon for- 
get the delights of the Champagne land, its genial 
hospitality, and the general facilities afforded me for 
obtaining information. 

People who think the sparkling nectar which they 
drink with such delight, and pay for so dearly, grows 
— corks, bottles, brands, and all — exclusively on the 
sunny hillsides and by the vine-hedged river-banks 
of Ay, Yerzenay, and Bouzy, are greatly mistaken ; 
but not more so, perhaps, than those who believe that 
Veuve Clicquot, Eugene Clicquot (who, by-the-way, 
is no relation of the " widow "), or M. de St.. Mar- 
ceaux, or Charles Heidseick, or Moet & Chandon, 
manufacture their wines from their own grapes grown 
in any particular locality. It is true, some of these 
proprietors are owners of large tracts of vine-growing 
lands, but not nearly of sufficient extent for the pro- 



THE BUBBLES OF CHAMPAGNE. 21 

duction of tlie enormous quantities of wine wliich 
thej yearly manufacture. 

The Champagne district is divided into a great 
number of parcels or tracts, on which the grape is 
grown, some of these tracts not being larger than an 
ordinary sleeping-room. The vignerons^ or vine-grow- 
ers, a hardy, happy race, are themselves the proprie- 
tors of the land, and they and their families devote 
their time and labor to the culture of the Champagne 
grape, which requires the most delicate care and at- 
tention. These grapes are sold to the various wine 
merchants, and the same grape is accessible to all. 

The manner of receiving the grapes from the vigne- 
rons is a very primitive and rather unbusiness-like 
one. The vignerons bring the grapes in baskets, 
packed on the backs of mules, to the presses, where 
they are measured in a tub about the size of a half- 
barrel — the measure being known as a cague, and 
holding about one hundred French, or one hundred 
and ten English pounds; a .record is made of the 
quantity received from each proprietor, but no receipt 
or voucher of any description is given. The vigne- 
ron, at the end of six months, calls upon the manu- 
facturer, and is paid one-half the amount due him, 
claiming the remainder only at the expiration of the 
year. 

By far the larger portion of the grapes from which 



22 AN AMEEICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

Champagne is made are black — a little grape which 
grows upon a low, stunted vine. Wines are seldom 
or never made from the black grape alone, nor ex- 
clusively from the white; but the black grape, whose 
juice, more vinous than that of the white, furnishes 
the " body " of the wine, is mixed with the juice of 
the white and more aromatic grape, and thus the deli- 
cate flavor and bouquet sue secured. The black grapes 
are grown principally — upon a vine never rising 
above the height of three feet, and which is cut down 
every year, the grape growing upon the new wood — 
at Yerzenay, Verzy, Mailly, Rilly, Bouzy, Ay, Ma- 
reuil, Epernay, and Pierry ; and the white, at Cra- 
mant, Oger, Avize, and Le Mesnil. 

There is no absolute and clearly defined rule gov- 
erning the proportions in which the wines from dif- 
ferent localities shall be mixed, nor for the proportions 
of the juice of the white and black grape used. Every 
thing depends upon the taste and skill of the manu- 
facturer, who, to insure success, must have a genius 
for his business — one might almost say his art — and 
a delicate and practiced palate, in order to distinguish 
the peculiar and different qualities of the different 
wines, and indicate with certainty the proper propor- 
tions in which they should be combined. Nothing, 
indeed, would seem more difficult than to distinguish 
readily the qualities of the several varieties of grape. 



THE BUBBLES OF CHAMPAGNE. 23 

to know in precisely what proportions to mix the vari- 
ous wines, and produce a Champagne uniting at the 
same time vinosity, bouquet, and the marked, homo- 
geneous character which each wine mercharrt desires 
for his own brands. A hundred trials and failures 
are not unfrequently made before success is obtained, 
and a wine produced upon which a first-class manu- 
facturer is willing to stake his reputation. 

One who has not studied the subject, or witnessed 
the care and labor bestowed in the production of 
Champagne wines, can form no accurate idea of the 
attention they require, or of the different changes they 
undergo before they are placed on the table. 

The first point is, of course, the selection and care- 
ful examination of the grapes and wines of the differ- 
ent localities — and then the great art and mystery of 
Champagne-making lies in the composition of the 
cuvee. The cuvee is the union of the various kinds of 
wine in greater .or less proportions, according to their 
strength and flavor, and the taste of the producer. 
The brand of Yerzenay, Bouzy, or Ay, upon a bottle 
of Champagne, to the uninitiated, conveys the idea 
that the wine was made from grapes grown in the 
particular locality indicated. Were this so, the wine 
would be very far from possessing the qualities which 
make Champagne so popular an article — the different 
crus requiring the aid of each other. The cuvee is 



24 AN AMEEICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

composed aboiit six months after the pressing of the 
grapes — "asually in the early part of April — up to 
which time the wine has remained in casks ; the mix- 
ture is then put in bottles, tightly corked, and placed 
in racks, piled up like logs of wood, in the immense 
subterranean cellars of the wine merchant. Here, 
under the influence of a temperature of from 50° to 
60° Farenheit, it undergoes a second fermentation ; 
the saccharine portion of the wine is transformed into 
carbonic acid gas, and into alcohol, or a new develop- 
ment of vinosity. Champagne is, of all wines, how- 
ever, the one which contains the smallest proportions 
of alcohol, a distillation rarely producing more than 
a little over six per cent, of its volume. After the 
alcohol, the most important ingredient is sugar. 

Champagne wine is marked, as distinguished from 
other wines, by the presence of a large quantity of 
carbonic acid gas — the escape of which is prevented 
by hermetically sealing the bottles before the second 
fermentation, by which it is developed. The gas is 
indeed so compressed and confined that it acquires 
the expansive force of six atmospheres, and each bot- 
tle of wine contains six times its volume of carbonic 
acid. 

Under the pressure of such a powerful force, the 
bottles, while lying in the racks, explode, and are bro- 
ken in considerable quantity: usually amounting to 



THE BUBBLES OF CHAMPAGNE. 25 

about ten per cent, of the whole. This breakage, 
however, has sometimes reached as high as fifty, six- 
ty, seventy, and in rare instances even eighty per cent. 
The Champagne merchants are rather pleased than 
otherwise at a loss of ten per cent., as it exhibits the 
fact that the development of carbonic acid, which 
gives the wine its sparkling quality, has been a good 
one. 

The bottle fermentation, which takes place without 
the addition of any foreign ingredient in generating 
the carbonic acid, also develops a deposit composed 
principally of tartaric acid and tannin, and which it is 
necessary to remove. After the wine, which in this 
fermentation becomes cloudy, begins to deposit this 
sediment, the bottles are removed from the horizontal 
position in which they have been resting in the racks, 
and are placed, with their necks downward, upon 
shelves with holes cut in them obliquely. Twice a 
day during two months, and frequently for a longer 
time, a man whose special business it is to attend to 
this, seizes each bottle by the bottom, gives it a little 
shake with the object of detaching the sediment from 
the side, and causing it to deposit in the neck of the 
bottle, which after each shaking is placed in a more 
nearly upright position. Finally the sediment all ar- 
rives in the neck of the bottle, the greater portion of 
it being deposited upon the cork. The process of de- 



26 AN AMEKICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

gorgement, or the extraction of the deposit, then takes 
place. This operation is a very important one, and re- 
quires a great degree of skill on the part of the oper- 
ator, who first seizes the bottle by the body, and rest- 
ing the neck depressed upon his left fore-arm, cuts the 
wire which confines the cork ; this he prevents from 
flying too suddenly with the index finger of the left 
hand. The operator then performs a manoeuvre re- 
quiring great dexterity : raising the bottle, with a 
pair of pincers he suddenly pulls the cork, which, in 
flying out, carries with it, and is followed by, all the 
deposit. Freed from this, the wine is perfectly clear 
and limpid, the bottle then containing not the slightest 
particle of sediment. 

The wine, however, is not yet in a drinkable con- 
dition. The greater portion of its saccharine matter 
having been transformed into alcohol and carbonic acid, 
the wine itself is acidulous, and disagreeable to the taste. 
It is therefore necessary, in order to replace the sugar 
which it has thus lost, and to restore it in this respect 
to its primitive condition, to introduce a mixture in 
greater or less quantity of pure crystallized sugar dis- 
solved in Champagne wine: the quantity of sugar 
added depending upon the country to which the wine 
is to be sent, and the taste of purchasers. The cork 
is then put in, and in a month or six weeks after the 
degorgement the wine is ready for market. 



THE BUBBLES OF CHAMPAGNE. 27 

It may not be uninteresting to the drinkers of 
Champagne to know what is the actual cost to the 
exporting merchant of the article for which they pay 
so much. 

The Champagne of commerce may be divided into 
three classes, each representing a different quality. 
The vin hrut, or raw wine of the ordinary quality, 
costs on an average one franc and twenty-five centimes 
per bottle ; the middling, from one franc and fifty to 
one franc and seventy-five centimes ; and the superior, 
from one franc and seventy -five to two francs and fif- 
teen centimes the bottle. 

The cost of the travail or composition, including 
bottle, cork, and the necessary admixture, is from forty 
to sixty centimes per bottle. The corks, all of which 
are cut by hand, principally by Spaniards, who reside 
in Eeims for that purpose, cost from two to four sous 
each. Those for Eussia, where the Champagne drink- 
ers are the most particular about the corks, cost the 
highest price. The wine merchants say that they are 
perfectly satisfied with a profit of fifty centimes a bot- 
tle, which added to the price of the raw wine, the cost 
of preparing it for market, and the small cost of send- 
ing it from Eeims or Epernay to the port of embar- 
kation, makes up the figure at which the merchants 
have always invoiced their wine. 

The finest and most expensive wines are sent to 



28 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

Eussia. For England a much heavier wine is made, 
as also for the United States, where a very "vinous" 
wine seems to be preferred, and whither very little 
first-quality wine is exported. A great many drink- 
ers, rather than connoisseurs^ prefer Champagne of a 
very dry and vinous character. This is a great error, 
as this dry and vinous characteristic is almost always 
obtained by the addition to the liqueur^ with which the 
bottles are filled after the degorgement^ of a greater or 
less quantity of brandy. Thus composed, the wine no 
longer possesses the delicate quality which should be 
considered the test of good Champagne — which can be 
drank with impunity without producing the headache 
and lassitude -which invariably follows the absorption 
of the alcoholic wines. 

The Champagne manufacturers are the aristocracy 
of the district, and form a society of their own, keep- 
ing apart from other merchants and manufacturers, 
and among them — as, for example, that of De St. Mar- 
ceaux — are some old and aristocratic names. Most of 
them are very wealthy, and up to the present time all 
the great and well-known houses have never been 
charged with any thing which would affect their in- 
tegrity. Parties interested in these houses occupy 
high, honorable, and important positions in political 
life. They are prefects and mayors and members of 
the Chamber of Deputies. M. Werle, the head of 



THE BUBBLES OF CHAMPAGNE. 29 

the house of Yve. Clicquot, and who is supposed to 
be worth fifteen millions of francs, is the Mayor of 
Keims, and member from this district of the Corps 
Legislatif. He is a Prussian by birth, and came to 
Eeims some thirty years ago a poor young man, and 
has gradually worked his way up to his present posi- 
tion. His principal, the Widow Clicquot (God bless 
her!), is now in her eighty-eighth year, and has made 
during the last thirty years a fortune of forty mil- 
lions of francs by the manufacture and sale of wine. 
She is a little dried-up old lady, only about five feet 
high, and lives in a splendid chateau, charmingly situa- 
ted on a hillside, surrounded with vines, at Boursault, 
near Epernay. The old lady, though she long since 
gave up all personal control of her wine manufactur- 
ing business, still manages the grape-growing, keeps 
her own farm and household accounts, drinks a good 
bottle of Yeuve Cliquot every day for dinner, and is 
a particularly smart old lady. M. Werle has a son 
married to the daughter of the Due de Montebello 
(also of vinous fame), and a daughter who married a 
son of M. Magne, the French Minister of Finance. 

Singularly enough, although such a peculiarly 
French wine, about all the trade in it has now fallen 
into the hands of Germans. M. Werie is a German, 
as is also the Baron de Saxe, his associate. The Heid- 
seicks, of whom there are three separate houses at 



30 AN AMERICAN" JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

Eeims — Piper Heidseick, Heidseick & Co., and Charles 
Heidseick, are all of German origin, as also is M. Piper, 
who obtained the right of joining the name of Heid- 
seick to his by marrying a "daughter of the original 
Heidseick house. The Mumms are also Germans. The 
purely French houses, such as Eugene Clicquot and M. 
de St. Marceaux, nearly all have Germans connected 
with them. This has been explained to me as result- 
ing from the fact that in the Champagne trade it was 
necessary to be familiar with several languages ; and 
that as the French as a nation never learn any tongue 
but their own, the Germans, who are the best linguists 
in Europe, have worked their way into the trade un- 
til now they threaten to monopolize it. 

Some excellent red still wines are made in the Cham- 
pagne districts, bearing the names of Yilledomange, 
Eilly, Marsilly, Yerzenay, and Bouzy, the latter being 
a wine of full body and flavor, very much resembling 
Chambertin, and selling here at nine hundred francs 
the " piece " or cask, or at the rate of about four francs 
a bottle. . At my hotel at Eeims it is retailed at sev- 
en, and this is the price charged also by mine host for 
all the sparkling Champagne wines, with the excep- 
tion of the Eoyal St. Marceaux, one of the purest, rich- 
est, and most delicate of the Champagne wines, which 
he holds at eight. 

Most of the wine merchants have their cellars be- 



THE BUBBLES OF CHAMPAGNE. 31 

neath their houses ; and these immense subterranean 
caverns are some of them two or three flights of stairs 
in height, or rather in depth, the lowest part being at 
least ninety feet under ground. I rode over to Eper- 
nay, which is about an hour by rail from Eeims,between 
hills covered and reaching to the very rails with the 
Champagne vine, passing by the little village of Ay, 
nestled in among vine-clad hills extending down to the 
banks of the sleepy, sluggish Marne. "We came over 
to visit the cellars of Messrs. Moet & Chan don, which 
are as extensive as any in the district. Going down 
a flight of stone steps, we reached a little room, where 
the guide furnished us with candles, and preceding us, 
led us through these catacombs of Champagne. The 
vaults are cut in the solid rock, having been made a 
hundred and fifty years ago, and are between five and 
six miles in extent, winding around in labyrinthine 
mazes, and consisting of two sets of tunnels, one hewn 
under the other. In all these, bottles of Champagne to 
the number of about 5,000,000 were piled up in racks, 
the butts toward us, and many of them covered with 
the mould which we could easily imagine would soon 
cover every thing left long in that damp, dank atmos- 
phere. Occasionally we came upon men working, 
bottling and corking and " disgorging " and " dosing" 
the wine. Eight men, the guide informed us, could 
bottle 1200 a day. The workmen receive five francs 



32 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

per day for their labor, which, considering that they 
usually die of diseases necessarily contracted in that 
horrible atmosphere before they reach the age of forty, 
certainly can not be considered high. 

Song and story have thrown so much romance 
about vine-growing regions and their inhabitants, 
that one who gathers his ideas of them from song 
and story is liable to imbibe very false views. This 
Champagne district, for example, in which the un- 
initiated and enthusiastic lover of nature and of ro- 
mance would hope and expect to find beautiful land- 
scapes, broad and smiling plain's; verdant river-banks, 
and green and sunny hillsides, all covered with a lux- 
uriant growth of the vine, and peopled with a hardy, 
happy race, whose principal occupation after the la- 
bors of the day is to dance and make love, and, in 
overflowing foaming flagons, sing Anacreontic songs 
in honor of the vine, will very much disappoint him 
in the reality. The soil of this whole district is white 
and chalky, abounding in carbonate of lime, which 
makes it very disagreeable to the eye. 

This calcareous soil seems particularly adapted to 
the growth of the vine, the culture of which is more 
easy, as the earth is light, and without compactness. 
In fact, upon these light calcareous soils, nothing but 
the vine will flourish. The country is generally flat 
and little diversified, and when I saw it, after the vint- 



THE BUBBLES OF CHAMPAGNE. 33 

age was past, and the stripped vines were rapidly 
falling into the " sere and yellow," it was particularly 
uninteresting. 

The vintage does not usually commence until 
about the middle of September, but sometimes it is 
completed by that time in consequence of the dry, 
warm weather, which hastens the ripening of the 
grape. 

The " vignerons " and their families are very much 
like the other peasantry in France, living in uncom- 
fortable stone houses, with neither front nor back 
yards to them, totally destitute of vines, flowers, or 
shrubbery, or any of that air of comfort about them 
which so strikes the traveller in the home of the En- 
glish cottager. In the whole agricultural region of 
France the traveller sees, as he journeys along the 
road, no solitary farm-houses. He travels miles and 
miles over cultivated lands without a mark upon them 
of habitation, until he reaches a village, made up of 
a long, straggling street, which is but a continuation 
of the high-road, and on each side of which are built 
the little, uncomfortable, unromantic, hot-looking stone 
houses in which the peasantry of France live. Cham- 
pagne, in this respect, does not differ from the rest of 
France ; and the fact that there are no fences or even 
hedges to separate the vine-growing lands from the 
roadside or from each other, the "metes and bounds" 



34 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

of each little proprietor's land being marked by piles 
of stones — gives the country a singularly monotonous 
appearance. Song and story usually convey the idea 
that the people in vine-growing regions are not only 
exceedingly happy, but exceedingly virtuous ; in fact, 
living evidences of the truth of the motto, " Be vir- 
tuous, and you will be happy." 

So far as the female portion of the laboring class 
of the residents of the Champagne district is concern- 
ed, I am sorry to be under the necessity of dispelling 
this illusion. Is it -some peculiarity in the climate, 
or the chalky soil which reflects back the sun's rays 
with such burning force ; or is it something in the 
wine, that makes Eeims, the great commercial centre 
of Champagne, one of the most eligible fields of op- 
eration for the labors of the Moral Keform Society 
that I have ever discovered in France or out of it? 
These tall, well-formed, and pretty Champenoises who 
" have left their father's house " and the labor in the 
vineyards, and come to Eeims to work at dress-mak- 
ing, or to tend shop, or labor in the woollen manu- 
factories here, and who, with little bundles in their 
hands, neatly dressed, with their rich, luxuriant growth 
of hair unconfined by cap or bonnet, may be seen in 
great numbers skipping over the trottoirs about feight 
o'clock in the evening, on their way home from work 
— these young ladies, although apparently very '' hap- 



THE BUBBLES OF CHAMPAGNE. 35 

py," and certainly exceedingly pretty, it is said make 
no claims to being " virtuous." The cure wlio offici- 
ates in the splendid cathedral, whose tall, heaven- 
pointing towers ought to direct the attention of these 
young women to higher things, is said to be called 
upon much more frequently to baptize infants who 
in the worldly wisdom of knowing their own fathers 
are profoundly lacking, than he is of those begotten 
and born in accordance with the strict rules of pro- 
priety, virtue, law, and the Church. These are mel- 
ancholy facts, and may furnish interesting subjects of 
consideration to moral chemists and analyzers. What 
is the cause of it? Is it the wine, the chalky soil, 
the burning sun, or the -cathedral? 

The highest-priced wines made in Champagne are 
those of L. Koederer & Co., most, of which go to Eus- 
sia. In fact, the Widow Clicquot and Koederer have 
almost the entire monopoly of the Champagne trade 
in that country, not -so much perhaps from the supe- 
riority of their wines as owing to the fact that there 
the merchant is subjected to a heavy additional tax for 
each additional house from which he imports. The 
wines sent to Germany, although less sweet than those 
which go to Eussia, are generally of the same character. 
The consumption of Champagne wines in France, rel- 
ative to that in other countries, is extremely small — an- 
other evidence of the fact that " a prophet is not with- 



SQ AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

out honor excepting in his own country." In Eeims 
itself it is not drunk to any great extent. At the 
tables of the " Champagne Kings " dinner is usually 
commenced with a vin du ;pays^ an ordinary wine of 
the country, followed up with a Burgundy or Bor- 
deaux ; and about the time the roti comes on the table 
the Champagne is produced, and, as a general rule, is 
served but two or three times to each guest. It is 
always served in long and very thin, and never in 
flat glasses. 

In Spain, Italy, and Switzerland, comparatively 
little Champagne is drunk, while in Belgium it is 
consumed in large quantities, the most popular brands 
being those of L. Eoederer, Yve. Clicquot, and De St. 
Marceaux. The " dry est," most vinous wines, are 
shipped to England, where, in point of importance (in 
quantity sent), the brands rank as follows: Moet & 
Chandon, Perrier, Jouet, Widow Clicquot, L. Eoederer, 
De St. Marceaux & Co., Piper & Co., Jules Mumm, 
Giesler & Co., Euinart pere et fils, Bollinger & Co. In 
point of reputation^ the wines exported to England 
rank, however, in the following order : L. Eoederer, 
De St. Marceaux, Widow Clicquot, Perrier, Jouet, Pi- 
per & Co., Bollinger & Co. The wines exported to 
the United States are made expressly for that mar- 
ket, and are usually of a " dry," vinous description. 
The house of L. Eoederer, whose wine is held in such 



THE BUBBLES OF CHAMPAGNE. 37 

high repute, exports very little to any American port 
but Boston. 

Champagne wines are usually considered the best 
about three years after the vintage ; after they attain 
the age of six or seven years they .begin to deterio- 
rate. With a little practical information relative to 
the preservation, and the proper mode and time of 
preparing Champagne for the table and of drinking 
it, I close the " vinous " portion of this chapter. The 
following is in the form of a circular, issued by the 
house of De St. Marceaux & Co. to their customers : 

" To preserve the effervescence and the quality of 
Champagne, it is indispensable to keep the bottles ly- 
ing down in a cool cellar; 

^^ Lying doiun^ because in any other position the 
cork becomes dry, loses its elasticity, and permits the 
gas to escape ; 

" In a cool cellar^ because from the effect of heat the 
gas, in expanding, may break the bottle, or, at least, 
spoil the cork ; in which latter case, there is a certain 
loss, and always a notable change in the quality of 
the wine. 

" In order that Champagne may be drunk in the best 
condition, it should h^frappe^ or cooled with ice, or in 
case there is no ice, it ought not to be brought up from 
the cellar except at the moment that it is to be drunk. 
Many persons are in the habit of cooling their Cham- 



38 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

pagne, by emptying it into a decanter of frozen water, 
or by putting into the glass of wine some pieces of ice. 
Both of these practices evidently weaken and alter the 
character of the wine, since they add to it more or less 
water. 

" Ordinarily Champagne is used as a dessert wine ; 
this is a gastronomic error; it should be served with 
the meats, when the palate, properly stimulated but 
not yet satiated, is able to appreciate the delicate fla- 
vor of the wine in all its fineness." 

My window in the " Lion d'Or" was directly op- 
posite the fagade of the noble Cathedral of Eeims. 
This edifice, in point of completeness and unity of de- 
sign, united with elegance and beauty in execution, is 
the finest, I think, of the Grothic ecclesiastical edifices 
of France. Unlike most of these, it was the design of 
a single mind, and was commenced and finished under 
the eye of the designer. It is said that a Christian 
church was erected upon the spot now occupied by the 
cathedral, in the year 401, upon the ruins of a temple 
of Yenus or Cybele. Clovis, the first of the Christian 
kings of France, is supposed to have been here bap- 
tized by St. Eemy. In 1210 the building was destroy- 
ed by fire, and the present edifice commenced the fol- 
lowing year, in accordance with the designs of, and un- 
der the supervision of, the architect, Eobert de Coucy, 
of Reims. It was completed in thirty years, and, with 



THE BUBBLES OF CHAMPAGNE. 39 

the exception of St. Paul's Cathedral, commenced and 
finished in thirty-five years by Christopher Wren, it is 
the only ecclesiastical structure of any note in Europe 
which has been completed during the life of the de- 
signer. St. Peter's in Eome required one hundred and 
forty-five years, and its erection ran through the reigns 
of nineteen popes, and employed the services of twelve 
successive architects. In 1481 another fire occurred, 
which destroyed the roof and melted 83,000 pounds 
of bell-metal. In 1794 the Convention caused to be 
placed over the main portal of the cathedral the fol- 
lowing inscription : " Temple of Eeason — The French 
People recognize a Supreme Being and the Immor- 
tality of the Soul." This was obliterated six years aft- 
erward, *and the cathedral restored to its original usS. 
The exterior is adorned with statues and bas-re- 
liefs ; nearly six hundred of the former surrounding 
the three magnificent portals in the facade. Over the 
side door is a design which, in spite of the seriousness 
of the subject, struck me as inexpressibly funny. It 
is intended to represent the "Last Judgment," and 
the Divine Judge is seated in a large arm-chair, while 
around and below him are rising from their cofiins 
(which resemble stone bathing-tubs) the dwellers upon 
earth, in different stages of nudity. On the left, a long- 
tailed and horned devil is pitching head foremost into 
a caldron below, and around which flames are rising, 



40 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

an unfortunate youth who was found on the left side, 
but whose chance of boiling seemed rather small, as 
the caldron was already full to running over with 
little unbaptized babies. Another devil was drawing 
toward the caldron, by a long chain which he had 
thrown around them, a number of monks a,nd priests. 

The interior is marvellously rich and beautiful, the 
light streaming through the rose and stained windows 
in many-colored hues. The grand rose of the fa9ade 
is unquestionably the finest in France. 

But it was from its historical associations that the 
interior of this grand and gorgeous temple was in- 
teresting to me. It was here that all the kings of 
France, from Philip Augustus, in 1179, to Charles the 
Tenth, with the exception of Henry the Fourth and 
Louis the Eighteenth, were crowned. Could these 
massive stone pillars be animated with life, what tales 
could they tell, what graphic descriptions give of the 
gayly-dressed and gallant courtiers, of the beautiful and 
noble ladies, of the imposing ceremonies which have 
passed before them ! As I stood in the chancel of this 
splendid cathedral, a vision rose before me, and a pro- 
cession of kings and queens and courtiers, and high- 
born, bejewelled, fair, and noble dames, seemed to pass 
me by, and among them all shone brightly the sweet, 
enthusiastic face of the inspired Maid of Orleans, who, 
with her sacred banner in her hand, came here in ful- 



THE BUBBLES OF CHAMPAGNE. 41 

fillment of her prediction that she would see Charles 
the Seventh ''crowned king at Eeims." 

It was principally due to the fact that Eeims was 
one of the cradles of Christianity in France that it 
was chosen for the consecration of her kings. It was 
here also that the Saint Ampoule^ or holy flask of oil, 
brought by a dove from heaven and given to St. 
Eemy at the baptism of Clovis, was kept, and this was 
used at the consecrating ceremonies. This flask was 
publicly broken by a sans culotte during the Eevolu- 
tion ; but by some means it was renewed, and appear- 
ed again at the coronation of Charles the Tenth. 

The tribunals of Eeims have a way of administer- 
ing justice which strikes me rather favorably, and 
which I would commend to the attention of the chalk- 
and-water drinking communities in other parts of the 
world. On the street corner opposite my hotel I ob- 
served some freshly -printed placards posted up ; and 
as any thing new began to be interesting, I imme- 
diately rushed over to read them. They proved to be 
some recent judgments of the Tribunal of Police in 
Eeims, and I would recommend their perusal to police 
judges and legislators. The first was against Fran- 
9oise Marguerite Boisse, who, it seems, probably think- 
ing that the milk which came from her cows was too 
rich for the stomachs of the Eeimois, had added to 
eight litres, or about two gallons of it, a quart of wa- 



42 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

ter, and sold the compound as milk. This fact having 
been established, Frangoise was sentenced to pay a fine 
of a hundred francs, suffer the confiscation of her com- 
pound, and to pay the cost of fifty copies of the decree, 
which should be posted up in the town, and one par- 
ticularly kept posted upon her door during the period 
of three months. Two other j udgments followed this : 
one of a coal-dealer, who, for putting in his sacks of 
coal a quantity of stones to " make weight," was fined 
fifty francs and sentenced to twenty days' imprison- 
ment ; and the other of a butcher, in whose posses- 
sion, and exposed for sale, was found a quantity of 
meat which was un peu trop haut^ and for which he 
was sentenced to three months' imprisonment and a 
heavy fine. This rigid administration of j ustice seems 
to apply to large as well as small matters. One of 
the best-known houses in Eeims is that of L.- Eoederer. 
In the early part of last year some young and enter- 
prising men who desired to establish themselves in the 
Champagne trade, and who considered that it would 
be a great advantage to them to commence business 
under the prestige of a well-known name, adopted the 
following expedient : Finding at Strasbourg a young 
man named Theophile Eoederer, they immediately in- 
duced him to come to Eeims, where they established 
a house, placing him at the head of it, known as "Eoe- 
derer & Co. :" and this brand was placed upon their 



THE BUBBLES OF CHAMPAGNE. 48 

wine. The old established house of Eoederer brought 
an action against them for '"'■concurrence illegalej'' or " il- 
legal opposition," and, after hearing all the facts, the 
Court decided that, not only must the new firm place 
upon their labels the first name of its head, but must 
also give in good-sized readable figures the date at 
which their house was established, so that there would 
be no danger of confounding it with the original firm. 
I had been at Eeims more than a week, and it was 
time to return to Paris. I took a last glance at the 
noble cathedral, jumped into the omnibus, and started 
for the station, not neglecting, however, to take a look 
from the omnibus window at the pretty, neatly-dress- 
ed, and well -formed Champenoises as they tripped 
along the street, and whose bright eyes and handsome 
features might have made sad havoc in the breast of 
a more susceptible man. 




CHAPTER IL 

TEENTE ET QUARANTE AT HOMBOURa. 

The Baths of Hombourg. — Hombourg and its Surroundings. — The In- 
ducement to Visitors. — The great Gaming-hell of Europe. — The 
Kursaal. — The Game of "Roulette." — My early Experiences. — 
"Systems," and an Exposure of their Fallacy. — The Scene at the 
Tables. — The Rouge-et-noir. — Large Winnings. — The Countess 
Kissel ef. — Tricks of Sharpers. — Profits of the Games. 

nnHE following advertisement — in all the glory of 
-^ staring capitals — appears daily in the Paris news- 
papers : 

" The saline, muriatic waters of Hombourg are recommend- 
ed by the most celebrated medical men as an efficacious rem- 
edy against maladies of the stomach, the intestines, and the 
liver. 

" The calm and freshness of the surrounding country, the 
sharp, pure air of the mountains, the magnificence of the for- 
ests, which form the belt of Hombourg, the variety of excur- 
sions and promenades, all unite in aiding the re-establishment 
of health. 

" The new Kursaal, so remarkable for its grand fa9ade, in 
the Florentine style, unites in its interior the conversation and 
reading rooms, the grand ball and concert room, and the res- 
taurant. 

" The excellent orchestra performs three times a day : in the 
morning, at the spring ; in the afternoon and evening, in the 
gardens of the Kursaal. 

" During the month of September, Italian opera — extraor- 
dinary representations of Mademoiselle Adelina Patti, with the 
aid of Mesdames Marchisio, Trebelli, Bellini, etc. 

" Foreign families will find at Hombourg a great number of 



TRENTE ET QUARANTE AT HOMBOURG. 45 

villas and hotels, fumislied in tlie most luxurious and comfort- 
able style." 

True — all true to the letter, but, as the sequel will 
show, not the whole truth. Hombourg is certainly a 
most charming watering-place, where nature and art 
seem to have vied with each other to realize the idea 
of an earthly paradise. It is situated nine miles from 
what was for centuries, and has continued until re- 
cently to be, the " free city of Frankfort," the great 
money-mart of the Continent, but which now, thanks 
to Bismarck and the needle-gun, has degenerated into 
a third-rate Prussian town. On one side of it rise the 
blue Taunus Mountains, from whose summits invigora- 
ting breezes biow down, and on the other stretches far 
away toward the Main a broad, extended, fertile plain, 
dotted with pretty farm-houses, whose roofs rise isola- 
ted, like ships, from out a sea of grain. On the mount: 
ain-side are thick, dark forests of oak and pine, beneath 
whose shade long, level, cool, delightful walks and 
drives lead up to the very mountain summit, and at 
convenient distances are several little German villages, 
in which the people still retain their queer, ancient dress 
and customs, the women wearing the odd-looking Ger- 
man cap, and skirts of even more than fashionable 
brevity, and the men remarkable swallow-tailed blue 
coats, with the waists in the immediate vicinity of the 
shoulders; here are lakes, on whose fair bosoms swans 



46 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

are floating; chsivmmg little bosquets in which, without 
much stretch of the imagination, mischievous, wicked 
Cupids may be supposed to flit from branch to branch ; 
parks filled with tame deer, which accept with pleasure 
their daily bread from the hand of the visitor ; five 
mineral springs, whose waters are recommended as 
sovereign in all diseases of the stomach and liver : one 
might readily imagine that all these advantages of lav- 
ish nature, and of art as lavish, were sufiicient to entice 
searchers after rest, health, or recreation to Hombourg. 
But it is neither the blue Taunus, nor the pure air, nor 
the darkling forests of oak, nor the sweet exhalations 
of the pine, borne on the wings of the summer breeze, 
nor the queer caps and swallow-tailed coats, nor the 
gardens and lawns, nor flowers, nor swans, nor Cupids, 
nor deer, nor even the world-renowned invigorating 
waters — it is not any or all of these combined — that 
form the principal inducement to the fifteen or twenty 
thousand people who spend a portion of the summer at 
Hombourg. A more powerful, irresistible attraction 
than any of these — a fascination which, once yielded to, 
holds, and binds, and charms, until it destroys its vic- 
tim — draws the large majority of those who visit this, 
the most extensive and dangerous of the public gam- 
ing-hells of Europe. And, in this, the advertisement 
fails. No one unfamiliar with the great and striking 
"specialty" of Hombourg need ever ^ imagine, from. 



TEENTE ET QUARANTE. AT HOMBOURG. 47 

its perusal, that here so many pockets were annually 
drained, so many hearts and hopes crushed, so many 
ambitions destroyed, so many bright dreams changed 
to sad, hard realities. Fronting upon the main street 
of the town, in the Florentine style of architecture, is 
the magnificeat Kursaal, the temple of Fortune. En- 
tering a spacious vestibule, treading upon a floor of rich- 
ly-wrought mosaic, the visitor, after passing through a 
corridor, suddenly finds himself in a salon of palatial 
proportions and splendor. The carved and gilded 
walls and ceiling are massive ; while immense mirrors, 
sofas, and chairs of damask, and heavy curtains of the 
richest satin, line the sides. A jingling of gold and 
silver falls upon the ear, mingled with the rattle of a 
ball; the subdued hum of voices from the devotees, 
broken upon by the louder tones of the high-priests 
of this mammon worship, uttering their oft-repeated 
and well-learned formula, '•'•Faites voire jeu^ messieurs! 
le jeu est-ilfait? Bie^% ne va plus P^''^ As he crosses 
the threshold, the visitor is expected respectfully and 
reverently to remove his hat, for he is in the inner 
temple, the sanctwn sanctorum of the fickle Diva^ 
and in full view, at either end of the salon^ are her al- 
tars — the tables devoted to rouge-et-noir and roulette. 
It is to be hoped that the reader, whether " gentle " 

* INIake your game, geutlemeii ! Is the game made ? Nothing more 
goes! 



48 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

or " simple," will never mistakenly prove himself the 
latter by indulging in and yielding to the fascinations 
of either of these games. And if " forewarned is to be 
forearmed," it shall not be my fault if he do; for I 
have had experience in both and in others, and, in my 
pride of youth, fondly believed that I could circum- 
vent, and coax, and win to my embraces the blind 
goddess, " who flatters but to destroy." I shall never 
forget my initiation into the mysteries of roulette. It 
was many years ago, upon a Long Island race-course, 
where an individual in a white hat, half covered with 
crape, a very flash vest and extravagant guard-chain, 
was inviting custom by the not very attractive assur- 
ance to his prospective victims that "the more they 
put down, the less they would pick up." So far as 
the fact was concerned, he was perfectly correct, and 
it must have been that there was a vein of honesty 
running through his nature which would not permit 
him to lend himself to a deception. The wheel he 
used was a "twenty-eight roulette," with "advan- 
tages" to the bank of a " single " and " double zero," 
and an " eagle " — three in thirty-one, or a little less 
than ten per cent. But when it is understood that, 
besides these apparent and legitimate advantages, the 
wheel was what is known to the initiated as a " snap- 
per," and that by simply touching a little concealed 
spring the honest individual in the white hat and 



TRENTE ET QUARANTE AT HOMBOURG. 49 

flash vest could cause the ball to drop into " red "or 
''black" at pleasure, it requires no very intimate 
knowledge of the doctrine of probabilities to perceive 
that the prospect of winning at that game was " poor 
indeed." I know that all the pocket-money I had 
been saving for months disappeared like dew in a 
June morning, and that I was obliged to content my- 
self with short commons of candy and cinnamon ci- 
gars for a long time afterward. 

It is not probable that at Hombourg the game of 
roulette is played with such a certainty of profit to the 
bank and loss to the player, but, on the contrary, the 
legitimate advantages are considerably less than they 
are at Baden-Baden, where the "percentage" of the 
bank is derived from a " single " and " double zero," 
while at Hombourg the former only militates against 
the player. The game is played upon a long table, 
covered with green cloth, around which the players 
sit or stand. In the <5entre of the table is a large hole, 
in which the roulette is fixed. This consists of a mov- 
able cylinder, the periphery of which is divided into 
thirty-seven compartments, severally numbered from 
to 86, and separated from each other by little wires 
of brass. The cylinder is put in motion by a push 
against one of the four branches, forming a cross, which 
surmounts it. During its movement a little ivory ball 
is thrown in the opposite direction ; and this spinning 



60 AN AMEKICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

round for a minute or more upon the immovable part 
of the apparatus, finally falls into one of the thirty- 
seven compartments. These, besides containing each 
a number, alternate in color — one being '' red," the 
next " black," and so around the entire circumference 
of the cylinder. Upon the number into which the ball 
falls depends the winning or losing of all the stakes 
upon the table. 

At either end of the tapis vert^ on each side of the 
cylinder, the thirty-seven numbers which it contains 
are painted in three columns, and the other chances 
which may be staked upon designated. The diagram 
on the opposite page, exhibiting the roulette and the 
tapis vertj will show the arrangement of the numbers 
and the other chances of the game, and a reference 
to it will render perfectly intelligible the explanations 
which are to follow. 

Now although, at first view, roulette appears to be 
an exceedingly complicated game, it is in reality a very 
simple one. The basis of it — the principle on which 
it depends — is the evident fact that the ball, having 
been whirled by the finger of the operator around the 
cylinder, must finally fall into one of the compartments 
of the wheel ; of these there are thirty-seven, and the 
object of the player, who wishes to bet upon single 
numbers, is of course to hit the winning one. In order 
to simplify the explanation of the chances at roulette, 



TRENTE ET QUARANTE AT HOMBOURG. 



51 






bj 


_=»» 


1 








-\ 




1 2 


3 


'1 


4 i 5 


6 


7 i 8 1 9 


c s^ 


10 1 11 


12 


'"I 


13 1 14 


15 


16 ; 17 


18 


19 1 20 21 


22 1 23 1 24 


Rouge. 


25 1 26 ! 27' 


'i 


28 1 29 1 30 


31 1 32 


33 


34 1 35 


36 


IstD 

(3) 


2dD 


3dD 

(0 


1st C2d C:3d C 


IstD 

(9) 


2dD 


3dD 

11 



(a) " Outs "{manque'), from one to eighteen, inclusive ; (b) " past " 
(passe), from eighteen to thirty-six, inclusive ; (c) even numbers (pair) ; 
(d) odd numbers (impair) ; (e) red (rouge or couleur) ; (f ) black {noir) ; 
(g) first twelve numbers ; (h) second twelve numbers ; (i) third twelve 
numbers ; (j) first column ; (k) second column ; (1) third cohimn. 



52 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

let it be supposed that a florin — the smallest sum per- 
mitted to be staked at Hombourg — be placed by thirty- 
seven different players, one upon each number on the 
tapis. One of these must evidently be the winning 
number, while all the rest must lose. Let it be sup- 
posed that the ball, after spinning until it loses its mo- 
mentum, drops into compartment " six," which is de- 
clared the winning number. The croupier then takes 
the florin from each one of the other numbers, amount- 
ing to thirty-six florins, and pays thirty -five of them 
to the fortunate better upon " six," the winning num- 
ber. Were the game a perfectly even one, did the 
bank have no " advantage " other than the player, it 
will be readily seen that the latter should in .this case 
receive thirty-six instead of thirty-five florins. But 
here is exhibited the " percentage," which exists in all 
banking games, and which at Hombourg provides the 
means for gilding and furnishing these splendid salons^ 
and keeping in order these magnificent gardens. This 
"percentage," as will be seen, is one in thirty-seven, or 
two and twenty-six thirty-sevenths per cent. To make 
still plainer this matter of "percentage" which ob- 
tains in all banking games, and which is but little un- 
derstood by the uninitiated, let it be supposed that a 
single player at roulette should place an equal amount, 
say one florin, upon each number from zero to thirty- 
six, inclusive, it is evident that he will win upon one, 



TRENTE ET QUARANTE AT HOMBOURG. 53 

and lose on all the others. Now were the game play- 
ed without any " percentage "or " advantage " to the 
bank, the banker should take the money from each and 
all of the losing numbers, and place it upon the win- 
ning one. The player would then receive thirty-six 
florins in addition to the one he placed upon the win- 
ning number ; and this making up the amount he had 
staked upon them all, he might thus continue playing 
without profit or loss to the end of time. But as at 
present the game is arranged, the player would lose 
one florin at each turn of the wheel, and in this man- 
ner the bank would, sooner or later, eat up the largest 
capital, without the player having the slightest possi- 
ble chance of winning. Kow although, of course, no 
player would be silly enough to bet in this manner, 
where it is palpable that he must lose and can not win, 
it must be borne in mind that, even though he bet upon 
but a single number, this same percentage, or advan- 
tage, of the bank, which can not in any manner be 
avoided, still remains, and that it must in time absorb 
his capital in the bank. Suppose a player to bet upon 
a single number during a whole day, week, month, or 
year ; — now the probability is, that, as there are thirty- 
seven numbers, one of which must win at each turn 
of the wheel, each one will make its appearance once 
in thirty-seven times. But should this be literally 
exemplified in the turning of the wheel, our player 



54 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

in each series of thirty-seven, during which he would 
lose thirty-six times and win once, would still be the 
loser of one florin ; as in the thirty-six times that he 
lost he would lose thirty-six florins, while the one win- 
ning would bring him back but thirty -five. Of course 
the chances never run so regularly as they are sup- 
posed to do in this case, but it none the less illustrates 
the principle. 

Besides betting upon a single number, the player 
may divide his stakes among several ; may bet upon 
any of the three columns, containing twelve numbers 
each, or upon the first, second, or third series of twelve 
numbers, being paid double if he win, or may play 
upon rouge or noir^ pair or impair^ which designate 
the odd or even numbers upon manque and jpasse, the 
former comprising the numbers from one to eighteen, 
inclusive, the latter, from nineteen to thirty-six. 

It is a singular scene, one of these gaming-tables. 
Around it, from eleven in the morning until eleven 
at night, sit or stand the players, an exceedingly 
" mixed " assemblage, gazing with covetous eyes upon 
the piles of gold and silver placed before the bankers, 
and watching with intensest interest the fluctuating 
chances of the game. There are males and females, 
old and young, leaders in the grand monde^ and leaders 
and satellites in the demi-monde; people who play be- 
cause they have plenty of money, and wish to amuse 



TRENTE ET QUARANTE AT HOMBOURG. 55 

themselves, and people who play because they have but 
little money, and want more. There are noblemen 
and titled ladies in abundance, and there are trades- 
men and professional men and gamblers, all sitting or 
standing, and elbowing, and brought into the closest 
contact with each other. There are hard-faced people, 
men and women, sitting at the tables, who live year in 
and out at Hombourg, and make gambling a profes- 
sion. These are usually persons who have small, fixed 
incomes, and who flatter themselves that they have 
discovered " systems " by which the games can be 
beaten, and the cruel divinity of chance circumvented, 
and who frequently sit for hours carefully noting the 
numbers as they appear at roulette, or pricking with a 
pin upon cards furnished for the purpose the winning 
color at rouge-et-noir, waiting for the combination to 
arrive which is embraced in their " system." 

These '' systems " for winning at the bank are nu- 
merous, but are all based upon the fallacy that chance 
is guided by law, which, if there be any such thing 
as "chance," is a contradiction in terms. The simplest 
and most apparent " system " for- winning at a bank- 
ing game — one which appears palpable and positive 
to the uninitiated player — is that of commencing with 
a small stake, and doubling it until it wins, when it 
is evident that the player will be the gainer by the 
amount of his original stake. But there are three 



56 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

formidable obstacles barring the way to the success of 
this plan ; could these be removed, the plan would be 
an excellent one, and one which would assuredly ruin 
all the gaming-tables of the world. The first of these 
is the lack of sufficient capital to enable an ordinary 
player to endure the losses. Suppose a player at rou- 
lette^ for example, in the application of this " system," 
should commence by staking a five-franc piece upon 
one of the " simple chances," say, to simplify the mat- 
ter, upon " red," and suppose that " red " should lose, 
as red or black not unfrequently does, twenty times in 
succession ; — his last stake would, in this case, amount 
to 2,621,440 francs, and the entire amount lost in the 
twenty bets to 5,241,915, or about a million dollars. 
It is only the old schoolboy illustration of the nails 
in the horseshoe, on a little larger scale. If the play- 
er were able to commence with a very small stake, 
were there no limit to the amount which he should 
be allowed to bet, it is evident that with an unlimited 
capital he could, by this " system," inevitably and 
surely win. But the bank is too wise to permit this, 
and the stakes at all banking games are limited at 
either extremity with a "minimum," below which, 
and a "maximum," above which no stake will be 
accepted. At Hombourg the minimum at roulette is 
fixed at one, and at rouge-et-noir^ two florins ; and the 
maximum upon the "simple chances" at roulette is 



TRENTE ET QUARANTE AT HOMBOURG. 57 

four thousand, and at rouge-et-noir five thousand six 
hundred florins ; so that a player commencing with 
the minimum at the former, would only need to lose 
twelve consecutive bets to attain the maximum, where 
he would be obliged, if he followed out his system, to 
return to his original stake, after having lost four 
thousand and eighty-three florins in the attempt to 
win one, which is all he would have done, had he at 
any time in the series of twelve gained a single stake. 
A little practical experience in this matter of winning 
at a banking game by " doubling " will soon con- 
vince any one, to his cost, of the impracticability of 
the "system." But, besides the obstacles mentioned, 
there is another, which no amount of care, circum- 
spection, or boldness can overcome— the " percent- 
age" of the bank— the fact that when "zero" appears 
at roulette, or the refait at rouge-et-noir, all parties on 
all sides and colors lose. This is sufiacient alone to 
ruin all calculations, and destroy all probabilities of 
ever permanently winning by a "system." 

Another exceedingly plausible " system " of win- 
ning at a banking game is one based upon the theory 
of the "equilibrium of chances," embraced in the 
aphorism that, " within a given period, two simple 
chance will appear an equal number of times." The 
practical application of this system, the infallibility 
of which an author, who has recently published a 

8^ 



58 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

book of advice to players, showing them how they 
can surely win, says is " as certain as the return of 
day after night," is playing upon " color," or any 
other simple chance, when it has either not appeared 
at all in a certain number of times, or when it is far 
in arrears of its opposite. If, for example, in a hun- 
dred turns of the roulette^ " black " had appeared but 
twenty times, and " red " eighty, the player upon this 
" system " would, with the idea of " restoring the equi- 
librium," commence betting and doubling upon the 
black. But in this '^ system " there is no more certain- 
ty than in any of the others. It is probable, although 
by no means certain, or capable of demonstration, 
either theoretically or practically, that the axiom as- 
sumed is correct, that were a man to live to the age 
of Methuselah, and should he in his earliest youth 
commence tossing a penny in the air, and continue 
this amusement during sixteen hours a day up to 
the time of his death — it is probable, although by no 
means positive, that during this long period of time 
nearly an equal number of " heads " and " tails" must 
have made their appearance. But the attempt prac- 
tically to apply this theory of " equilibrium " to any 
limited space of time — to hours, days, or even years — 
is, as any one can easily satisfy- himself by trying it, 
a simple absurdity o 

Still more palpable and inviting to a young player 



TRENTE ET QUAE ANTE AT HOMBOURG. . 59 

is the idea that after a "simple chance" has lost a 
considerable number of times consecutively, it must 
soon win. . If, for example, at roulette^ the " red " has 
appeared at eight successive turns of the wheel, it 
seems evident to the superficial calculator that the 
piobabilities are strongly in favor of "black" on the 
next turn, and the temptation to bet upon it is to the 
neophyte almost irresistible. But this is a fatal error. 
Chance is subject to a certain degree of calculation, 
guided to a certain extent by mathematical law. Be- 
fore the penny has been tossed, the chances are ex- 
actly equal that it will fall with "head" or "tail" 
uppermost, but the probability is as three to one, that 
"heads " will not appear twice in succession — as seven 
to one against three consecutive appearances, as fif- 
teen to one against four, and so on in arithmetical 
progression. But when these probabilities have been 
surmounted, when the penny actually has fallen with 
the " head " up at four successive tosses, the chances 
again become exactly equal that it will fall " head " 
or " tail " upon the fifth, there being, after the former 
has been made, no connection between the fourth and 
fifth toss. The same rule applies to roulette or rouge- 
et-noir. Before the turn of the wheel, the chances are 
as 255 to 1 that red or black will not win eight times 
in succession ; but, having done so, upon the ninth 
turn the probabilities are relatively just what they 



60 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

were on the first, and the chances of red or black win- 
ning or losing exactly equal. 

One of the most favorite of the " systejjis" played 
at Hombourg and Baden-Baden, both against roulette 
and rouge-et-noir^ and one the plausibility of which is 
particularly striking, is that known as the " decom- 
posed eight." The theory of this system is, that no 
eight coups will come in precisely the same order twice 
in succession. Thus, for example : if at roulette^ dur- 
ing eight consecutive turns of the wheel, "red" has 
appeared twice, then "black " twice, then " red " once, 
and "black " three times, the player of the " decom- 
posed eight " is prepared to back his opinion that the 
next eight turns will not yield precisely the same re- 
sult in exactly the same order. To profit by this, 
he bets the minimum of one florin upon the " black." 
If it wins, his object is accomplished; his "system" 
is verified ; he has won his florin, and prepares to 
attack the following eight coujps in the same man- 
ner. But should it lose, he then, nothing daunted, 
places two florins upon the "black;" if that lose, four 
upon the " red ;" that losing, eight upon the " red ;" 
then sixteen upon the "black;" and thus doubling 
each time he loses, and always in opposition to the 
corresponding turn in the previous series of eight. 
It will be readily seen that, in accordance with this 
system, unless the two series of eight do successively 



TRENTE ET QUARANTE AT HOMBOURG. 



61 



appear in precisely the same order, the player must, 
at some time before he reaches the last number of the 
second series, win one florin. A diagram will ren- 
der this perfectly plain. Suppose the first series of 
eight to have appeared, and be marked as follows : 



BLACK. I RED. 



1_1 



In such case the player would exactly reverse this 
order, and make his bets as follows : 

BLACK.] RED. 



' I 

! 
i_l 

•_! 

!_: 



62 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

This system, upon which a book has been written, 
showing how, with a capital of two hundred and fifty- 
six florins, a certain and sure profit of sixty florins a 
day may be made at roulette^ is, however, as fallacious 
as any of the others. Its plausibility is very much 
heightened by the assumed irregularity of the coups 
in the series of eight against which it is proposed to 
be played. In principle, it would be precisely the 
same to assume that after "black " had appeared eight 
times in succession, it could not immediately appear 
eight times more. The second series of eight is quite 
as likely to follow the first, in what may be called ir- 
regular, as in regular order : it is just as probable that 
in sixteen turns of the wheel the last series of eight 
should be the same as the first, as that "red" or 
"black," or any other "simple chance," should ap- 
pear sixteen times in succession, which it does by no 
means unfrequently. 

There are many other more or less complicated 
"systems," professors of which are found ready to 
teach them to verdant pupils at all the gamin g-hells 
of Europe. It may be safely said, however, that all 
are based upon fallacies, and that, at least while the 
bank retains its "percentage," and limits the players 
to a " maximum " and " minimum," no banking game 
can be beaten by a " system." 

The rouge-et-noir, or trente et quarante^ as the game 



TRENTE ET QUARANTE AT HOMBOURG. 63 

is indiscriminately entitled, is not so well known in 
the United States as the roulette. It is, however, the 
principal attraction at Baden-Baden and Hombourg, 
and is played with six packs of cards, shuffled and 
mixed together, the players sitting or standing around 
a table covered with green cloth. In the centre is 
placed the dealer, and opposite him and at either end 
the croupiers^ whose duty it is to assist the players in 
placing their stakes, to see that no errors are made, 
and to push or pull in the lost money with long 
woodep rakes. Upon one side of the table a diamond- 
shaped piece of red cloth is inserted ; upon the oppo- 
site side a black one. The players desiring to " back " 
the red, place their money upon the former; those 
having faith in the black, on the latter. The dealer 
encourages the players with the formula which, like a 
parrot, he repeats from hour to hour, scarcely ever 
varying its monotony with another word — ''^ Faites 
voire jeu^ messieurs — -fdites votre jeu f and as he sees 
all the money placed he declares ^'■Lejeii 'est fait f^ and 
then, commencing to turn off the cards, closes with 
^'' Rien ne va plus^^^ after which all bets made are null 
and void. In dealing the cards, he places them upon 
the table, counting aloud the spots as he does so, the 
court cards being valued at ten each, and all the oth- 
ers at the number of spots which they bear. The 
dealer must continue turning and counting until he 



64 



AN AMERICAN JOUENALIST IN EUROPE. 



reaches at least thirty-one, and can not go beyond 
forty. The first series, between thirty-one and forty, 
counts for the " black," and this being completed, he 
turns off another for the " red." The one which ap- 
proaches the nearest to thirty-one is the winning series. 
To make this plainer, suppose, for example, the first se- 
ries of cards to be turned off in the following order : 



^MK 




# # 




# # 




4» 




* 


* 


^B 




# ^ 












4^ 


* 


mW^ 




# * 




# # 




♦ 




* 


* 



These, as will be seen, count in the aggregate thir- 
ty-three, and this, exceeding thirty-one, completes the 
series for the " black," and the dealer then commen- 
ces with the second series for the " red." Suppose 
this to appear in the following order : 



♦ ♦ ♦ 

♦ A ♦ 

♦ ♦ * 




i 






» 


4" 




^ ^ 

^ 
^ ^ 



This, the " red " series, counting in the aggregate 
thirty -four, and this being farther removed from '.'thir- 
ty-one" than the first series, the "black" wins; the 
dealer declares that '•'■ rouge perd'''' and all the bets 
made upon the first or " black " series are paid, while 



TKENTE ET QUARANTE AT HOMBOURG. 65 

those upon the last or " red " series are raked in to 
swell the capital of the bank. Another mode of bet- 
ting at rouge-et-noiT is upon "color," or against it. 
These bets are decided by the color of the last card 
turned in the winning series. If the " black," or first 
series, wins, and the last card turned in that series is 
a black one, as in the diagram given above, then 
"color" wins ; but if it be a red card, then "color" 
loses ; the winning of " color " depending upon the 
last card in the winning series being of the same color 
as the winning series itself. The " advantage " to the 
bank at rouge-et-noir is known as the refait. Should, 
for example, each of the series count thirty-two, or 
any equal number between that and forty, the bets 
upon either side are a " stand-off," that is, they neither 
win nor lose, and the players may resume or change 
them at pleasure. If, however, each of the series 
should count thirty-one, then all the bets upon both 
sides are placed "in prison," depending upon the next 
turn for being taken out or lost — this being in reality 
equivalent to taking one-half of each stake upon the 
table. At Hombourg, however, the bank relinquishes 
a portion of its advantages, and contents itself with a 
demi refait, the stakes being only placed "in prison" 
when the last card of the last series is a. black one. 
The refait of thirty-one is calculated to occur about 
once in thirty-eight times, which gives the bank a 



66 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

percentage of about two and two-thirds, which is re- 
duced at Hombourg by the demi refait to just half 
this amount. 

The fact that there is a smaller "percentage" 
against the player at rouge-et-noir than at roulette, to- 
gether with that that the bank is larger, renders it the 
more popular of the two games. As the minimum 
permitted to be staked is two florins, and the maxi- 
mum five thousand six hundred, the play is usually 
much higher than at roulette ; and as the game is con- 
sidered more "respectable," it attracts usually a bet- 
ter class of players, whose piles of gold and heaps 
of paper money are scattered about the table. The 
"bank" amounts to 150,000 francs, and that at rou- 
lette to 30,000. These are not unfrequently "broken" 
by high players when others of the same amount are 
put up ; for in spite of all the obstacles in the way of 
winning, notwithstanding the decided "advantages" 
in favor of the bank, capital, boldness, and good for- 
tune not unfrequently overcome them, and result in 
large profits. During the time I was at Hombourg 
a Eussian arrived there with a capital of two thou- 
sand francs. In the course of a week he had broken 
the bank several times, and was a winner to the 
amount of 800,000 francs. He was, however, ambi- 
tious to swell this to a million, and, in his attempt to 
accomplish this, lost the whole, so that the administra- 



TKENTE ET QUARANTE AT HOMBOURG. 67 

tion was obliged to give Mm a hundred francs with 
which to get away from Hombourg, which was paid 
out of a fund kept and nursed by the administra- 
tion for the benefit of those unfortunate individuals 
who "come after wool," and are so thoroughly "shorn." 
Such cases as that of the Eussian are by no means 
uncommon, and form the capital of a considerable por- 
tion of the daily gossip of the place. There are others, 
and more melancholy ones, of men and women who 
have been wealthy, but whose passion for play has 
been their ruin, and who, having lost their all, still 
hang about the tables, their eyes and ears pleased 
with, the sparkle and jingle of gold and silver, and 
their hopes buoyed up with the impression that they 
may be able to beg or borrow from some fortunate 
player a small stake, with which they may finally re- 
trieve their losses. Occasionally some poor fellow 
who has lost all but his brains, concluding that these 
will not be of much further practical use to him, dis- 
turbs for a few minutes the quiet progress of the 
game by blowing them out with a pistol. But such 
little incidents as these only increase the stock of in- 
teresting gossip, and the ball goes on spinning as 
briskly as ever. 

The oldest and most celebrated hcibitue of the 
gaming-tables of Hombourg is the Countess Kisselef, 
wife of the former Russian minister to Rome. She is 



68 AN AMEEICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

an old lady of seventy, and a long time since her pas- 
sion for play became so great that her husband in- 
formed her that she must either give up it or him. 
She chose the latter alternative, and went to Hom- 
bourg, where she has lived for the last ten or twelve 
years, spending almost her entire day at the roulette 
table. She is a cripple, and unable to walk, and every 
morning at eleven, when the game commences, she is 
wheeled up to the Kursaal in a bath-chair, and hob- 
bling in upon crutches, or leaning on the arms of her 
servants, takes her place at the table, where she sits 
till six, when she goes to dinner, returning at eight, 
and playing till eleven o'clock. And this routine of 
life continues week-days and Sundays, summer and 
winter, year in and year out ; and the old lady, who 
is evidently fast fading out, will, in all probability, 
drop off some day between two spins of the roulette 
wheel, and as the croupier appropriately announces, 
" Le jeu est fait — rien ne va plus P She is said to 
have lost some ten millions of florins, or about four 
millions of dollars, and the administration counts upon 
her as being worth at least five hundred thousand 
florins a year to the bank. Some years since she built 
a block of houses and opened a new street in Hom- 
bourg, to which her name was given; but houses and 
lots were long since swallowed up, and have gone to 
feed the insatiable maw of the demon of gaming. 



TRENTE ET QUARANTE AT HOMBOURG. 69 

Two valuable practical lessons may be "learned by 
a little observation, study, and reflection at such a 
place as Hombourg. The first is that persons who 
play against the games slowly and systematically, con- 
tenting themselves with losing or winning only a cer- 
tain amount daily, are sure in the end to be losers by 
the "percentage" or "advantage" which the game 
possesses. The other is that, except in rare instances, 
those who make sudden and large winnings usually 
play until they have lost them all again. The fasci- 
nation of play is so overwhelniing, the excitement so 
pleasing and so powerful, that the winner, elated with 
his good fortune, sees no reason why it should not last 
forever ; and having fixed no limit at which he will 
cease playing, continues until he has lost all. Keep- 
ers of gaming-houses count even more upon the pas- 
sions of players than upon the legitimate advantages 
of their games — upon the fact that a winner is desir- 
ous of winning more, and a loser of retrieving his 
losses, and that both have but one fixed and positive 
stopping-place — the bottom of their purses. . 

Besides the amateur and professional gamesters at 
Hombourg, are others who gain a livelihood by keep- 
ing the run of the games upon little cards furnished 
for the purpose, and selling them to those who desire 
the information ; then there are broken-down players, 
who hang about the tables, awaiting an opportunity 



70 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

to pick up a "straggler" or "sleeper" — a stake whicli 
its legitimate owner neglects or forgets. Sharpers, 
who take other people's money when occasion offers, 
and who even play tricks upon the bank itself, are 
permitted to remain in the rooms until they are fairly 
detected, when they are banished the premises. The 
croupiers^ of whom there are six at each roulette^ and 
four at each rouge-et-noir table, keep a sharp watch, 
and are familiar with most of the "dodges" resorted 
to to swindle the bank ; yet occasionally some enter- 
prising sharper succeeds in beating it upon a very cer- 
tain basis. One day during my summer residence at 
Hombourg, a very respectable-looking man placed 
upon the " red " at rouge-et-noir a rouleau^ which, being 
put up in blue paper, resembled in size, form, and 
general appearance the rouleaux of fifty silver florins 
each which the bank frequently pays out. The " red" 
lost ; and the croupier was about raking in the rou- 
leauj when the better remarked that he would prefer 
to keep it, and handed at the same time five bills of 
ten florins each to the croupier, who, accepting them 
as an equivalent, pushed back with his rake the rou- 
leau. The better allowed it still to remain upon the 
" red," which at the next turn of the cards won, when 
the croupier, in payment, handed him the five ten-florin 
bills which the better had just paid him. The better, 
however, objected to this; and breaking open the 



TRENTE ET QUARANTE AT HOMBOURG. 71 

rouleau^ exposed, instead of fifty silver florins, fifty 
quintuple gold Napoleons of a hundred francs each, 
for which he demanded an equal sum in payment. 
The croupier objected, stating that, in exchange for 
the roukaii when it was lost, the better had given him 
but fifty florins, thus leading him to believe that to be 
the amount which it contained. To this proposition 
the better replied that that was not his affair; that, 
in placing the rouleau upon the table, he had made 
no declaration as to how much or how little he had 
staked ; that the croupier^ when it lost, had a perfect 
right, and that, indeed, it was his duty to have taken 
it ; that if he had blindly consented to accept fifty 
florins in its stead, that was simply an evidence of his 
neglect of the interests of the bank ; but that now it 
had won, it must be paid. The matter being referred 
to the administration, it was decided that the better 
was right in theory, and the value of the rouleau being 
paid him, he was politely requested never to grace 
again the splendid salons of the Kursaal with his 
presence, while the croupiers were instructed to take 
all rouleaux which were lost instead of their presumed 
equivalents. 

A few days afterward an exceedingly clever swin- 
dle was practiced at the roulette table. A highly re- 
spectable looking old gentleman, with a decided mil- 
itary air, and wearing a decoration in his button-hole, 



72 AN AMEEICAN JOUENALIST IN EUROPE. 

took a seat at the table and placed a gold Napoleon 
upon a single number. It lost, and he placed a second 
upon another number. This lost also, and he contin- 
ued betting and losing half a dozen Napoleons, when 
a young man came rushing up to the table in great 
haste and placed a silver florin upon "thirty-six" 
a second after the croupier had announced that as the 
winning number. As it was evident that the money 
had been placed after the number was declared, the 
croupier^ informing him that he was " too late," push- 
ed the florin piece with his rake toward the young 
man. As he did this, he uncovered a gold Napoleon 
lying upon the same number beneath the silver florin. 
This the croupier also pushed off, when the old gen- 
tleman with the decoration, in a storm of indignation 
and wrath, seized it, and placing it back upon the 
winning number, insisted upon its being paid. " He 
was not responsible," he said, "for the young man's 
having covered it with his florin ;" and as he seemed 
to be an exceedingly respectable old gentleman-, and 
as he had been betting Napoleons, the croupiers took it 
for granted that all was as it appeared to be, and paid 
him thirty-five Napoleons. The old gentleman then, 
apparently highly indignant at the slight hesitation 
which had been exhibited about paying him, and as- 
serting that he would play no more with such " vo- 
leursj^ took up his money and departed, and within 



TRENTE ET QUARANTE AT HOMBOURG. 73 

the next fifteen minutes he and his young friend were 
probably on their wslj to Frankfort. A day or two 
after the occurrence it was ascertained that the same 
scene had been enacted by the same parties at Baden. 
The young man was, of course, the old one's accom- 
plice, and had placed the Napoleon upon the winning 
number at the same time with the florin. 

It is impossible to ascertain even approximately 
the amount of money annually lost at Hombourg, 
where, unlike most of the gaming establishments of 
Europe, the tables stand invitingly covered with sil- 
ver and gold, and the ball spins, and the cards are 
turned, and the everlasting monotonous formula, 
^'•Rienneva plusP'' is heard all the year round. Some 
idea of it may, however, be gathered from the expenses 
to which the administration is subjected, and the prof- 
its which it derives. The gaming privilege is owned 
by a chartered association whose nominal capital is 
3,200,000 florins, divided into shares of 250 florins 
each. The company pays annually to the Govern- 
ment a tax of 60,000 florins, lights and keeps clean 
the streets of Hombourg, supports the hospital there, 
expends three thousand francs, or about six hundred 
dollars a day, in keeping in good order and repair, 
and in constantly adding new embellishments to the 
grounds and buildings, pays its shareholders a divi- 
dend of twenty per cent, per annum, and then puts 

4 



74 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

aside a large amount as a sinking fund for the re- 
demption of the stock, which, if the gaming privilege 
is continued a few years longer, will have cost the 
shareholders nothing. 

It is generally supposed that, looking upon gaming 
as contra honos mores^ the Prussian Government, which 
has recently come into possession of the territory of 
Hesse Hombourg, will not sanction its continuation; 
and the administration, hotel, shop, lodging aiid bath 
house keepers are in a terrible state of anxiety, all 
imagining that they and their various interests and 
occupations will be ruined if the fascination of plaj^ 
ceases to be the attractive inducement to the summer 
visitors at Hombourg. In such an event, the large 
majority — the fast men and rapid women, the gam- 
blers and the sharpers — would of course disappear. 

But the Taunus would still be as blue, and the 
breezes blowing from its summits as fresh and exhila- 
rating as ever ; its waters as benejacial, its gardens and 
woods as romantic and lovely; and the really "re- 
spectable " visitor need no longer feel that he was en- 
couraging by his presence, if not aiding by his pe- 
cuniary contributions, the continuance of an evil 
which, in all ages and countries, has been deemed one 
of the most detrimental to moral health. 



CHAPTEE III. 

A TRAMP IN THE BERNESE OBERLAND. 

From Zurich to Altorf. — The Falls of the Rhine. — Zurich and its 
Surroundings, — Vagabonds. — My Companion. —Horgen. — Outfit 
and Travelling-dress.— Knapsacks and Gibicieres.— The HiW. above 
Horgen. — An unwarrantable Intrusion. — The " Falken" at Zug. — 
Gretchen and her Sympathy. — Arth. — Guides and Commission- 
naires. — The Ascent of the Rigi.— Dismal Weather. — TheKlosterli. 
— The Rigi Staff el. — "View" from our Windows. — The Summit 
of the Rigi, and the View from there. — Down to Weggis. — Lucerne. 
—The Lake of Lucerne.— Fluellen.— Altorf.— From Altorf to Mei- 
ringen. — Our pedestrian Excursion fairly commenced. — Unpropi- 
tious Circumstances. — Beggars in Switzerland. — The Devil's Bridge. 
— Realp.— The Road to the Fui'ca. — View from the mountain Sum- 
mit.— Necessary Precautions. — The Glacier du Rhone. — A pedes- 
trian Wedding-tour.— The Grimsel.— The Valley of the Aare.— 
The Falls of Handeck.— From Meiringen to Interlaken.— A Differ- 
ence of Opinion, and its Results.— War er and I separate.— A mag- 
nificent View.— The Glacier of Rosenlaui.— The Alpenhorn.— 
Warer and I meet again. — Grindelwald.— Ascent of the Glacier. — 
An unpleasant Predicament.— The Avalanches.— The Jungfrau.— 
How to "share" a Mule.— Lauterbrunnen.— Termination of our 
Trip. — My Companion Warer. 

IT was "by the margin of fair Zurich's waters, at the 
close of a fine summer's day," that my friend Wa- 
rer and myself took passage upon the little boat which 
steams the length and breadth of the lovely lake of 
Zurich. We had come into Switzerland from Munich 
by way of Lindau, had crossed the lake to Constance, 



76 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

had visited the Ehine-fall at Schaffhausen, where we 
had admired the charming cascade as it leaps and 
tumbles in graceful, foaming beauty over and among 
the limestone rocks which here dam up the Ehine, 
We had grumbled, and my friend had used language 
even more emphatic, at the persistent and successful 
attempts of the dwellers on the height above the fall 
to shut it out from view and make a peep-show of it ; 
and we had laughed heartily at the turgid enthusiasm 
of Klopstock, and still more heartily at the note in 
our Baedeker informing us that "this magnificent 
cataract, though far inferior in volume and height, is 
considered by some to surpass the celebrated falls 
of Niagara in North America." To one who has 
seen Magara (which by the way never fell to the 
lot of Klopstock or Baedeker), any comparison of 
the Ehine-fall with it is simply ludicrous. We had 
spent two days in Zurich, had explored its queer 
old streets, had ascended the heights above it, from 
which is obtained a fine panoramic view of the town, 
with the green and rapid Limmat running through 
it. We had strolled for hours upon the borders of 
that calmest and loveliest of Swiss lakes; and my 
companion, with his artistic glance, and myself, with 
an eye ever freely open to the beautiful in na- 
ture, had gazed in silent admiration, not unmingled 
with awe, upon the lofty snow -crowned Alpine 



A TEAMP IN THE BERNESE OBERLAND. 77 

peaks, which tower like giant sentinels guarding its 
slumbers. 

We had provided ourselves here with the necessa- 
ry articles for our journey, had paid our bill to mine 
host of the Sonne, and considered ourselves fully pre- 
pared for a month's foot-tramp among the Swiss 
mountains, as we stepped, on the afternoon of the 
last day of August, at four o'clock, on board the boat 
which was to bear us to a place with the musical name 
of Horgen, about fifteen miles from Zurich, on the lake, 
and at which point we purposed commencing our pe- 
destrian tour. 

I have now, always had, and hope I always shall 
have, a liking for '' vagabonds :" for that large class 
of unpractical fellows, made up in great part of 
artists, students, and literary men, whose lack of 
worldly wisdom is more than compensated for by 
their warm, impulsive, generous natures ; whose 
hearts still remain young, and fresh, and warm when 
the crow's-feet of time are making lasting marks 
upon their faces; whose faith in man and wom- 
an has not yet been destroyed by their hard ex- 
perience in life, but who still believe that there is 
goodness, and purity, and love, and a friendship un- 
uncontrolled by selfish interest; whose creed in this 
matter is so fully expressed in the lines of Frances 
Kemble : 



78 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

' ' Better trust and be deceived, 
And weep this trust, and that deceiving. 
Than doubt one heart which if believed. 
Had blessed one's life with true believing : 
Oh this mocking world ! too fast 
The doubting fiend o'ertakes our youth : 
Better be cheated to the last 
Than lose the blessed hope of truth. " 

I like men "unstable as water" — even though 
they do not excel in what most of the world deems 
" excellence." 

My friend and companion -was one of these un- 
stable, steadfast men. The child of " poor but hon- 
est parents," he had followed the tide of emigration 
to California, where he had spent several years " dig- 
ging " in the mines, or farming, or writing funny things 
for newspapers. Among the grand , mountains and 
green and flowery valleys of California, his artistic 
nature had been developed, and his fine taste in color 
in part revealed to him. He determined to abandon 
trade and pursue art ; and having fortunately secured 
in San Francisco a little piece of land which produced 
him an annual revenue of three hundred dollars, and 
throwing himself upon this never-failing, though cer- 
tainly modest resource, he determined to come to Eu- 
rope, and reverently sit, pencil in hand, at the feet of 
the great masters. 

I first met him in Paris in the spring of 1861. 
There are natures which instinctively mingle with 



A TRAMP IN THE BERNESE OBERLAND. 79 

each other, and it was perhaps the watery, "unsta- 
ble" element in mine that went leaping and bounding 
to join its like in his. At all events, Warer was from 
that time no longer companionless, and many a genial, 
pleasant hour we spent together either in my rooms 
in the Quartier Latin^ strolling through its quaint 
streets, or through the art galleries, and, in pleasant 
summer afternoons, among the villages and woods in 
the neighborhood of Paris. I found him living in a 
little garret in the Ciie^ just large enough to hold a 
very narrow bed ; and here he made a cup of tea and 
ate a roll of bread for breakfast, and cooked a mutton- 
chop over a spirit-lamp for dinner. I suspect, also, 
that during the first two months he was in Paris, be- 
fore he made an arrangement for the regular transmis- 
sion of his funds, he had frequently " dined with Duke 
Humphrey." Still, in all his troubles, not the least of 
which was an occasional hemorrhage, he was steadily 
pursuing the object of his visit to Paris, going at eight 
o'clock in the morning to the School of Design, and 
working there till noon, then to the Louvre, whete he 
copied till four, and in the evening again to his study 
and practice. 

Thus he worked on for nearly a year, but, on the 
outbreak of the war, he felt it his duty to lend his na- 
tive land his aid. He returned to the United States, 
and, not feeling himself physically able to perform the 



80 AN AMEEICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

duties of a soldier, at once entered the hospital depart- 
ment, and acted as nurse to the sick and wounded sol- 
diers, until he himself, worn out and ill, was discharged, 
and returned to Europe to recommence the study of 
art. Friends mourned over him, and called him " un- 
stable." Unstable as he may have been in other 
things, he certainly was fixed and devoted enough to 
the profession he had chosen, and if health and life are 
spared him he will some day find his name inscribed 
high on the list of painters. Such was my companion 
— genial, moody, devoted, capricious, serious, " unsta- 
ble" and fixed — in short, as most of us are, a bundle 
of contradictions. 

We had determined, on starting, to travel as 
economically as was consistent with a reasonable de- 
gree of comfort, and to eschew "grand" hotels, and 
put up at the less pretentious but frequently quite as 
comfortable auherges ; and as we had both had some 
experience in the swindling ways of landlords, it 
was arranged that, upon arriving in a town or vil- 
lage," Warer should go on a voyage of exploration, 
and make a bargain in advance for lodging and prov- 
ender. 

At Horgen we went to the " Lion," a roughly- 
built chalet^ with those large, wide porticoes which are 
the distinguishing characteristic of the Swiss houses ; 
here Warer had found a room with two clean beds 



A TEAMP IN THE BERNESE OBERLAND. 81 

for a franc each, and we made a very decent supper, 
with a bottle of wine, for twenty - eight sous. My 
dress for the excursion consisted of a stout suit of 
coarse woollen clothing, a flannel travelling-shirt, a 
soft " wide-awake," and a pair of heavy double-soled 
laced boots reaching a little above the ankle, and in 
which a Zurich cobbler had driven a double row of 
hobnails. My socks were heavy, but fine wool : cot- 
ton should never be worn in walking long distances, 
as it cuts the feet ; while with good woollen socks well 
soaped on the inside every morning with common 
brown soap, and with a fair degree of courage and 
determination, the loftiest mountains can be scaled, 
and the ruggedest roads marched over with compar- 
ative ease. 

My friend had wisely provided himself with a light 
canvas knapsack, which, with a keen eye for a bar- 
gain, he bought at a shop in Zurich, the contents of 
which principally consisted of old knapsacks, boots, 
hats, alpenstdckers, and other articles used by pedes- 
trians, and which, having served their purpose, had 
been disposed of here by travellers who had comple- 
ted their journeys. I had been seduced by the mis- 
representations of one of " fair Zurich's daughters " 
on the margin of the lake, who had no knapsacks for 
sale, but did have gibicieres^ or wallets, into the pur- 
chase of one of the latter. Many pedestrians travel 

4* 



82 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

with these, and prefer them to the knapsack. Mine 
was made of light cotton cloth, bound with a prepa- 
ration of caoutchouc, and was worn hanging near the 
hip, suspended by a broad strap passing over the 
shoulder. There are some advantages in the wal- 
let ; it can be easily dropped, or shifted from one 
shoulder to the other, or it may be carried in the 
hand. I should, however, recommend the knapsack, 
which does not fatigiie the wearer as much as the wal- 
let does. 

In mine I had stowed away the articles which, from 
some experience in pedestrianizing, I considered indis- 
pensable for a fortnight's tramp ; these were a linen 
blouse, a pair of light trowsers, a flannel travelling- 
shirt, two pairs of socks, a pair of light low-quartered 
shoes, half a dozen collars, an opera-glass, a small port- 
folio containing materials for writing, a piece of soap, 
a comb, brushes, a paper of pins, a little box contain- 
ing needles, thread, and buttons, a small ball of twine, 
and my guide-book ; all these, with careful packing, 
may be pressed into an astonishingly small space. In 
addition to the gihiciere^ I also carried an umbrella, 
slung with a strap across the back or used as a walk- 
ing-stick, a small flask in my pocket, and a plaid 
shawl, fastened either upon the outside of the wal- 
let, hung loosely over the shoulder, or rolled into 
a sort of rope and tied around the waist. The shawl 



* 
A TRAMP IN THE BERNESE OBERLAND. 88 

and blouse I found invaluable. In midsummer, an 
overcoat, unless it be a thin '' mackintosh," as a pro- 
tection against rain, is an entirely unnecessary bur- 
den. My companion, besides his knapsack, carried 
in his hand a large portfolio of canvas and drawing- 
paper, and a box of colors, fastened together by a 
strap. 

It was a dull, damp, drizzly, unpropitious morning, 
about half past six o'clock, when Warer and I, having 
completed our toilets and our breakfasts, shouldered 
our packs and started out of the village up the hill 
above Horgen. We had laid out no lengthened route, 
but were decided to mount first the Eigi, and go from 
there in whatever direction inclination might lead us. 
Our first morning walk was to be to Zug, situated 
on the lake of that name eleven miles from Horg-en. 
We mounted the hillside, stopping to pluck a few del- 
icately blue-fringed gentians, which grew here in wild 
profusion, and when we had reached the summit, four 
and a half miles from Horgen, sat down to rest. The 
rain had ceased, and the sun appeared in all his splen- 
dor. Below us, far down the hillside, lay the sleep- 
ing lake of Zurich, and upon the other slope in the 
distance, the charming little sheet of Zug. The Eigi 
and Pilatus, with light clouds floating below their 
heads, rose up into the blue sky, and farther off the 
sunshine fell .upon the eternally snow-covered mount- 



84 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

ains of tlie Bernese Oberland. We sat an hour min- 
gling our souls with this grandeur and sublimity, and 
felt a glow of enthusiasm such as had not warmed us 
in many a day. With these everlasting hills, peaceful 
lakes, and lovely valleys in sight, we forgot man and 
his littlenesses, his towns and cities, and his many 
inventions, and we gazed and drank in to the full- 
est of our capacity the splendor spread and piled 
around us, talking the while of Grod, and art, and 
beauty. 

Descending the hillside, we passed a large cotton- 
mill, standing silent for want of raw material, and far- 
ther on entered a gasfAaus, where Warer, who spoke 
a little German, made a pretty girl, who was either 
landlady or landlady's daughter, understand that we 
were thirsty and wanted beer. She served it to us, 
and it was tolerably good. The lass was rosy and 
buxom ; but, as she handed us the foaming glasses, 
her pretty red lips were protruding in a most unmis- 
takable pout, and the manner in which she put the 
beer down evidently signified " There — take that, and 
go." The fact was, we had intruded upon what was 
undoubtedly, to her, a pleasant tete-d-tete; and as we 
were in the best possible humor with the world, we 
drank our beer and took our departure as quickly as 
possible. 

We reached Zug at half past eleven, and passing by 



A TRAMP IN THE BEENESE OBERLAND. 85 

in scorn the "Hirsch" and the "Bellevue," and dodg- 
ing the gang of hotel-runners and commissionnaires and 
guides who here assailed us, we proceeded to a quiet 
little inn, the " Falken," where, in a large common 
dining-room, we ate a passable dinner, consisting of 
soup and roast meat, sausage, potatoes and cabbage, 
with half a bottle of wine ; price a franc and a half each. 
A bad, rough German is the language of the common 
people in all that portion of Switzerland through 
which we passed ; ' and few of them understand a 
word of French. Here, however, we found as waiter, 
and apparently as general manager of the eating and 
drinking department, a strapping Grerman girl, who 
had picked up a sufficiency of French to enable us to 
converse with her upon ordinary topics. She served 
us with alacrity, and her sympathetic face wore an 
evident look of pity for us — ^two poor strangers, far 
away from home, travelling on foot with heavy 
packs, and a long journey before us. Her sympathy 
indeed took a practical turn, and she gave us, I be- 
lieve, a double allowance of sausage. Upon leaving 
the house, which we did after a rest of three hours, 
she followed us to the door, and when I offered her 
a small piece of money for service she refused it ; and 
as we reached the end of the street, turning round to 
take a last look at the "Falken," we saw Gretchen 
still standing in the doorway, following our footsteps 



86 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

with her sympathetic eyes. Poor Gretchen! I have 
always been more than half disposed to believe that 
her big good heart had been suddenly warmed with 
a feeling more kindly even than " sympathy " for my 
friend Warer. 

We left Zug for Arth, at the other end of the lake, 
which is but nine miles long and three wide, at three 
o'clock, and reached Arth, lying at the foot of the 
Rigi, in a little more than an hour. Here, upon land- 
ing, we were again assailed by a crowd of thirty or for- 
ty hotel-runners, commissionnaires^ porters, and guides, 
who offered their services to conduct us up the mount- 
ain either on foot or horseback. We shook them 
off, and, forcing our way through them, marched on 
to the ''Schussel," where we found a handsome land- 
lady, and a fragrant smell from the kitchen. So we 
went into the ''Schussel," and were not disappointed. 
An excellent supper with wine, and a breakfast, the 
universal one in Switzerland, tea or coffee, bread, 
butter, and honey, costing us, with lodging, but four 
francs each. 

The rain fell in the morning as Warer and I, noth- 
ing daunted, commenced the ascent of the Eigi at 
seven o'clock. I had, and I presume most travellers 
going for the first time into Switzerland have, a not 
very well defined idea that their ascent of mountains 
will be through snow, while the fact is that in " the 



A TRAMP IN THE BERNESE OBERLAND. 87 

season," and upon the ordinary travelled routes, the 
tourist never touches snow or ice expect when cross- 
ing a glacier. If he strike from the beaten path and 
mount into the higher Alps, then indeed he will find 
enough of it ; but the routes which most pedestrians 
follow in Switzerland are as destitute of snow as are 
the streets of Zurich. 

The guide-books inform us that the summit of the 
Eigi, which is 5541 feet above the level of the sea, 
and 4196 above the lake of Lucerne, may be reached 
in three hours and a half from Arth. Its perform- 
ance in this time, however, depends upon obedience 
to one of the guide-book rules, which under ordinary 
circumstances is a good one for the pedestrian, en- 
joining him to walk slowly and steadily at the rate 
of sixty steps per minute. When we commenced the 
ascent the rain had been falling for some days, and 
the broad and well-defined path had been trodden by 
the feet of horses and m^en into a thick paste, through 
which we could make our way only with great diffi- 
culty. A soft fine rain, wetting all the trees and un- 
derbrush, which in turn wetted us as we mounted, was 
falling, and soon a thick fog enveloped us, shutting 
out the view of lake and verdant valley. And so we 
slowly, and rather wearily, wended our way up the 
mountain-side, with nothing in sight above or below 
but the dripping trees, the dullness and monotony of 



88 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

the scene varied only by the occasional appearance, 
looming up in the mist, of a stray cow whose ap- 
proach was heralded by the tinkling of a bell, which 
in these mountains are placed upon the necks of 
flocks and herds. ISTow and then we met a traveller 
on foot or on horseback, or a lady carried by porters 
in a chair, all looking damp and dismal, and as anx- 
ious to get down as we were to get up. There was not 
certainly much romance in this ; but Warer, who, like 
Mark Tapley, considered it no credit to be jolly ex- 
cepting under unfavorable circumstances, told some of 
his funniest stories, and made some of his best jokes, 
and sang the refrain of an amusing song, as over 
stones, under trees, and through mud, we picked our 
way upward. With good walking we should have 
reached the little chapel of St. Maria zum Schnee 
(our Lady of the Snow), built for the cowherds at a' 
height of four thousand feet up the mountain-side, by 
ten o'clock. As it was, the Klosterli, as the village 
consisting of half a dozen houses about the chapel is 
called, came in sight at noon, and we were glad 
enough to make our way directly to the " Schwert," 
an unpretending but comfortable little inn, with a 
blazing log-fire in the dining-room, and from whose 
kitchen issued the savory smell of boiling cabbage. 
We dried ourselves before the fire, dined well, and 
rested an hour. At half past two p.m. we reached 



A TRAMP IN THE BERNESE OBERLAND. 89 

the Eigi-Staffel, about twenty minutes' walk from the 
Eigi-Kulm, or summit of the mountain. Here we de- 
termined to remain for the night, and, as we were 
soaked through, make an entire change of clothing. 
In the house we found several tourists, who had been 
waiting three days in vain to see sunrise and sunset 
from the summit. The prospect was dismal enough ; 
and, as night approached, the fog seemed to grow 
thicker — the "view" in every direction being con- 
fined to a distance of less than six inches from the 
window of the inn. Kot a patch of blue sky, or a 
single snow -crowned peak, or quiet lake or green 
valley far down the mountain-side, did we see that 
day. My companion contented himself with mak- 
ing a brilliant sketch of a "Yiew'from the Eigi in 
a thick fog," while I wrote some letters from " up in 
the clouds." 

We made a good supper, and gave orders that we 
should be called at four o'clock, so that if there were 
to be any sunrise we could reach the Kulm in time 
to enjoy it. A little after five we were at the sum- 
mit, just as the gray of dawn was beginning to streak 
the eastern sky ; the gray grew whiter and clearer, but 
no sun made it bright and transparent, or came out to 
throw his golden glory over the snow which covered 
the mountains for a circumference of three hundred 
miles around us. But as daylight grew, the scene be- 



90 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

came sufficiently grand and beautiful. Looking to- 
ward the east, the eye rests upon a mountain-chain 
more than a hundred miles in length, embracing some 
of the loftiest, grandest, and most celebrated snow-cov- 
ered peaks of Switzerland. The huge snowy crest of 
the Grlarnisch, the Scheerhorn, the cone-like Bristen- 
stock, the Blackenstock, and the Uri-Eothstock, side 
by side, and both so near that their shining glaciers 
are plainly discernible ; then the lofty mountains of 
the Bernese Oberland, their heights covered with per- 
petual snow, standing up like a mighty barrier against 
the sky ; the Finsteraarhorn, nearly fourteen thou- 
sand feet in height; next to it the Schreckhorn, 
and the three white peaks of the Wetterhorn, look- 
ing as pure and ' clean and delicate as loaves of 
sugar; the Monch, and the Eiger, and the beautiful 
Jungfrau. The eye becomes bewildered in gazing 
upon these mountains, and turns with pleasure to 
the less formidable attractions of the beautiful scene 
below. 

The commonplace comparison of " a map " is the 
only one which will convey an accurate idea of the 
effect of looking down the mountain - side. Eleven 
lakes are seen peacefully lying in what look like little 
holes in the mountain, and directly at the foot of the 
Eigi are those of Lucerne and Zug. All these lakes 
are in sight. The trees down the mountain-slope and 



A TRAMP IN THE BERNESE OBERLAND. 91 

by the margin of the lakes instantly remind one of 
the little toy trees such as children play with sur- 
rounding little toy houses. Two or three rivers wind 
their ways through the valleys, and the eye can follow 
their courses for thirty or forty miles. Descending 
the mountain in much less time than it required to 
mount, Warer stopping to sketch a singular arch 
formed of two huge masses of conglomerate which 
have rolled together, and upon the top of which a 
third one has tumbled, we reached Waggis, on the 
lake, where we were to take the boat for Lucerne at 
ten o'clock. 

The sun had come out clear and bright by the time 
we reached Lucerne, where we secured a comfortable 
room at the '^ Lind.en " for the reasonable sum of a 
franc and a half each, and then proceeded to see the 
lions of the town, the principal one of which is that 
of Thorwaldsen, and, retiring early, rose at seven, ar- 
ranged our packs, and^took the steam-boat at eight 
o'clock for Fluellen, on the lake, and but two miles 
from Altoipf. 

In point of picturesqueness the lake of Lucerne is 
surpassed by none in Switzerland, or indeed in Eu- 
rope. It is shut in by forest-clad hills, back of which 
rise the eternal mountains, their snow-covered tops 
frequently seen standing clear and bright in the sun- 
shine, while clouds are playing far below them. The 



92 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

slopes of tlie hills are covered with fruit-trees and 
gardens, reaching down to the very margin of the 
lake, the borders of which are rich in historical as- 
sociations. We pass the green meadow of the 
Eutli, where the conspirators joined hands and swore 
to be faithful to each other, and not to rest till 
they had delivered their soil from the polluting 
tread of the oppressor. A little beyond it is Tell's 
chapel, erected on what is supposed to be the very 
spot where the Swiss hero leaped from the boat of 
Gessler. i 

Fluellen is the point of debarkation for travellers 
who intend crossing the St. Gothard into Italy, and 
here we were again set upon by a horde of guides, 
who pressed their services upon us. As a rule, the 
pedestrian is much more independent without a guide 
than with one; and unless he acts as porter and carries 
the traveller's pack, he is really of very little use on 
any of the travelled routes or over the well-known 
mountain-passes, upon which, with a good guide-book, 
an ordinary amount of judgment, and a slight knowl- 
edge of German, it is almost impossible for a traveller 
to lose his way. 

In ascending the higher Alps, among the snow, 
crossing the glaciers, or exploring portions of the 
country comparatively unknown and but little trav- 
elled, a guide is indispensable. 



A TEAMP IN THE BEENESE OBEELAND. 93 

A pleasant walk of ten miles through gardens 
and orchards brought us to Altorf — a name as fa- 
miliar to me from earliest childhood as that of the 
village in which I was born. I had spouted Tell's 
speech to the " men of Altorf," and boldly and val- 
iantly, amidst the wonder and applause of the au- 
dience, in my schoolboy days, knocked down and 
trampled on the cap- and "insolence of Gessler," 
little dreaming"! should ever stand near Tell's na- 
tive village, and upon the very spot, perhaps, where 
he had inspired the "men of Altorf" with his elo- 
quence. 

Historians have thrown some doubt about the exist- 
ence of William Tell ; but no man, unless he be very 
cold and skeptical, can remain ten minutes in the lit- 
tle village of Altorf without yielding implicit faith to 
the fact that he was a reality, and no myth. A learn- 
ed savant of Switzerland, a few years since, at the 
meeting of a historical association in Greneva, read a 
paper in which he demonstrated, to his own satisfac- 
tion at least, that William Tell was a creature of fa- 
ble. A year afterward he came to Altorf, probably 
in quest of further information in support of his 
theory ; but upon the inhabitants learning that he was 
there, they formed themselves into a posse comitatus 
and waited upon him with an intimation that Altorf 
was not a healthy locality for him, and that they 



94 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

would seriously recommend him to take the next 
boat for Lucerne. He instantly comprehended the 
force of their shrewd remarks, and, shaking the dust 
of Altorf from his feet, departed and returned no 
more. 

Here, in a little square in the centre of the village, 
is the colossal plaster statue of Tell, erected upon the 
very spot where it is supposed its living model stood 
when he aimed the arrow at the apple on Albert's 
head. About forty yards distant is a fountain, and 
a statue of a burly bailiff of Altorf, named Besler. 
Besler himself erected this statue at his own expense. 
The effigy of the bailiff is supposed to stand where 
the lime-tree grew, at whose base stood the noble 
child of Tell during those terrible moments when he 
awaited the arrow from his father's bow. 

We had left our packs at the "William Tell," a 
little inn at the entrance of the village, while we ex- 
plored it, and so, returning to the " Tell," we ate a 
bad dinner, and a little after noon, as the rain was be- 
ginning to patter upon the flag-stones of Altorf, we 
passed out of the village on the great St. Grothard 
highway. 

I had purchased an alpenstock on the Rigi, but 
my companion looked upon the alpenstock as a 
sham, an affectation, and a weakness, in which he 
would not indulge. This light pole, about the size of 



A TRAMP IN THE BERNESE OBERLAND. 95 

an ordinary broomstick, and seven feet in length, 
with a sharp prong at the end, and which is always 
used by the mountaineers in Switzerland, I found of 
great service before our trip was ended, particularly 
in our subsequent mountain 'climbing. Upon reach- 
ing Fluellen, we considered our pedestrian excursion 
fairly commenced, and intended accepting the services 
of neither man, beast, or steam-engine, as aids to loco- 
motion, till it was completed. 

The circumstances attending it were certainly un- 
propitious. "We had time to take a run up into the 
Bannwald^ or sacred forest, near the old Capuchin 
monastery. The trees of the forest are never touched 
by the axe of the woodman, as they are a protection 
to Altorf from the rocks which roll and tumble from 
the summit of the steep hill that overhangs the vil- 
lage. We had time to stray a little from the main 
road to see the village of Burglen, where Tell was 
born, and where a chapel, whose walls are covered 
with painted scenes from his life, stands upon the site 
of his birth-place. 

There was little in our journey of that day that 
was cheerful or interesting. The country through 
which we were passing was level, and slightly diver- 
sified, and but one mountain of any considerable alti- 
tude, the black fir-covered pyramid of the Bristen- 
stock, was in sight Amstag, which lies at the foot 



\)b AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

of this, was our destination, and we reached it, wet, 
tired, and not in the best humor, about six o'clock in 
the afternoon. 

As we approached the Italian canton of Tessin, 
which borders upon Lombardy, we could not fail to 
observe a marked change in the physiognomy and 
speech of the people. Upon reaching the outskirts 
of Amstag, we were surrounded by a troop of beggar- 
boys and girls, such as now appear to the stranger at 
the entrance of every Swiss village. It seemed as 
though each family in the town had sent a deputation 
to make an attack on our pockets. Throughout the 
whole country, the rising generation is growing up 
a nation of beggars; everywhere, on all the public 
roads, on the mountain-passes, on their very summits 
among the snows, nearly every child the traveller 
meets asks him for money. In the little chalets in 
which the herdsmen live, they watch for his approach, 
and run out to meet him, and persistently follow him 
as long as there is the slightest hope of softening his 
heart and opening his pocket. It is a disgrace to the 
Swiss Government that measures are not adopted to 
put a stop to this serious annoyance. We " descend- 
ed " at the ^' Lowe," in Amstag, a wretched inn, 
which every traveller having a proper regard for his 
stomach and his purse will carefully avoid, and which 
we left as soon as possible. 



A TRAMP IN THE BERNESE OBERLAND. 97 

It was a beautifully clear and sunny morning as 
we left Amstag, and, crossing over the bridge, took 
the road toward the great St. Gothard, up the valley 
of the Eeuss, which leaps, and rushes, and foams, and 
tumbles in graceful cascades and waterfalls down the 
steep ravine through which it runs. Before us, in 
the distant blue, rose the St. Gothard ridge ; on our 
left was the black pyramid of the Bristenstock, and 
piled all around and above us mountains, on whose 
sides, far up toward their summits, little patches of 
snow were lying, and small glaciers sparkling like 
beds of diamonds in the morning sunshine. All 
along this valley the hills'ides are covered with a del- 
icate reddish lichen, having the odor of the violet, 
and called the " violet-moss." We passed through 
several little villages, and crossed over a succession 
of bridges, and, continually ascending the torrent of 
the Eeuss, which becomes more and more rapid in its 
fall, we reached about noon the wonder on this road, 
the Teufelsbrilcke^ or Devil's Bridge. 

A scene of wildness and desolation here appears. 
The river, formed into a beautiful waterfall, plunges 
into a black depth a hundred feet below, and throws 
its spray all above and around. Eocks are piled 
and tumbled in its bed, and, leaping over and cours- 
ing around them, dashing up against them, the riv- 
er, lashed into a thick white creamy foam, pursues 

5 



98 AN AMEKICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

its way, and high above the fall the single-arched 
bridge is spanning it. Above the bridge the river is 
obstructed with rocks ; its banks are barren and des- 
olate ; and a gust, which the natives facetiously call 
the Hutschelm^ or " hat rogue," bears with it the wet 
and spray into the traveller's face as he crosses the 
bridge, or stops to gaze into the abyss beneath him. 

Five minutes' walk brought us to a tunnel cut 
through the solid rock, and called the Urner Loch. 
When we had emerged from this, we found ourselves 
at the entrance of a broad valley, where the Eeuss no 
longer tumbles and leaps, but flows gently and sweet- 
ly through its rich, grassy meadows. What a contrast 
to the scene we had left behind us ! there all was tur- 
moil, confusion, and savage wildness; here stillness, 
order, and peaceful beauty. '"Tis a type of life," 
moralized my companion; "and in our stormiest 
hours we should always remember that hedging our 
very pathway there may be awaiting us a smiling 
valley of beauty and of calm." 

The Easselas valley into which we now entered 
was the vale of Uri, nine miles long, and about three 
wide. It is shut in by itself, and out from all the 
world, by barren and partially snow-covered mount- 
ains, above which the sun in midsummer rises late. 
Eight months of the year here are considered winter, 
and during the remaining four fires are frequently 



A TEAMP IN THE BERNESE OBERLAND. 99 

necessary to comfort. The inhabitants live by flocks 
and herds, and by guiding travellers and transporting 
their luggage over the St. Gothard. 

About two miles from the "Devil's Bridge" is 
Andermatt, a little village, where we made an excel- 
lent dinner for three francs at the " Poste," in whose 
register we left a warning to travellers against pa- 
tronizing the Lowe at Amstag. After this we pursued 
our journey, passing through Hospenthal, where we 
left the St. Gothard road, and on to the inconsidera- 
ble village of Eealp, where we were to stop for the 
night. It was nearly dark when we arrived at the lit- 
tle hospice formerly inhabited by some Capuchin 
monks, but now converted into an inn. It contains 
but three rooms, however, and is still presided over 
by Father Arsenius, a Capuchin, with a long gown, 
and the bare feet and shaven head of his order. 

"We supped passably, slept soundly, and breakfast- 
ed early at the hospice of Eealp, and were charged but 
four francs each ; and at half past six o'clock in the 
foggy morning, which soon changed to a rainy one, 
we shouldered our packs, and, bidding good-bye to 
the Capuchin, took our way up the rugged mount- 
ain-side toward the Furca, which we reached between 
nine and ten o'clock, thoroughly drenched. 

The "Furca," so called from its two peaks, which 
bear a fanciful resemblance to the prongs of a fork, is 



100 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

a mountain ridge at an elevation of nearly eight thou- 
sand feet. Thence, in clear weather, a fine view of 
the Bernese Alps, and especially of the lofty Fin- 
steraarhorn, is obtained. We saw nothing from it, 
however, but a pig-pen and a chicken-coop, about six 
yards distant from the inn window. In the dining- 
room we found a good fire, at which we dried our 
shoes, and met some English and American pedes- 
trians, who had come from the other direction. 
Among the travellers whom the fog had delayed on 
the Furca, were two gentlemen who had recently as- 
cended Monte Eosa. Both of them bore evidence of 
having seen hard service — one, with frozen feet, being 
scarcely able to walk, and the other with his face and 
lips covered with festering blisters. 

The fog and rain had nearly ceased when, leaving 
the Furca, we descended the steep and rugged slope 
toward the Glacier du Ehone, which soon appeared 
in sight. There it lay below us! a sea of ice, about 
four miles in width, and reaching eighteen miles up 
into the valleys, in which it lies imbedded between 
the Gelmerhorn and the Gersthorn on the one side, 
and the barren Galenstock, which we had been as- 
cending and descending, on the other. This was the 
first glacier of any importance which we had seen, 
and for nearly an hour we skirted its base, looking 
up toward its summit. The first impression was that 



A TEAMP IN THE BEENESE OBEELAND. 101 

of a mighty cataract, suddenly frozen as it fell, and 
tumbled down the valley between the mountains. 
The ice which forms it is rough and honey-combed 
upon the surface, but on the sides of the immense 
yawning fissures which open all over it it is pure 
and clear as crystal. We did not go on the glacier, 
but followed the path just by the edge of the mount- 
ain, within a few feet of whose base the glacier 
reaches, and over the moraine^ or rocks and stones, 
which these immense moving masses of ice bear down 
with them. 

Coursing its way beneath a vaulted arch of clear 
blue-tinted ice, its waters tinged with gray, flows a 
narrow little stream from the side of the glacier, and 
here, with the aid of the alpenstock, I could have 
leaped across it. This is the source of the Ehone, 
which, flowing on, and gathering force and size from 
mountain streams and melting snows, gradually be- 
comes a mighty river, "discharging itself into the Med- 
iterranean after a course of five hundred miles. 

We had intended crossing the mountain, which 
rises abruptly just after passing the glacier, and reach- 
ing the Grimsel hospice before night, and had com- 
menced the ascent, when a persistent guide, who had 
evidently been on the lookout for us, drew such a 
terrible picture of the danger we ran of losing our 
way, that we concluded to stop at the hotel for the 



102 AN AMEBIC AN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

niglit. We met there an Irish gentleman and his 
young bride, who were making a pedestrian trip 
through Sw^itzerland — their wedding-tonr. They had 
already been two months traversing the mountain- 
passes and valleys, usually walking from eight to ten 
hours a day — taking an amount of exercise which 
would probably appall the young brides of Ameri- 
ca. As they were going our way, and were to leave 
the next morning, we joined them, starting at six 
o'clock, in a thick fog, up the Maienwand, blooming 
now with Alpine flowers. The gentleman was dress- 
ed very much as were my companion and myself, 
while the lady wore a short skirt and a round straw 
hat, and she, as well as her husband, carried the al- 
penstock, and trudged along bravely and firmly as 
any of us in that long day's march. Upon reaching 
the summit, what was our surprise to find our friend 
of the evening before awaiting us to pilot "us down to 
the Grrimsel. Whether he had patiently remained 
there all night we did not ask him, but coming. to 
the conclusion that so much perseverance ought to 
be rewarded, we permitted him to lead us down the 
stony, rugged mountain-side. 

At the old convent, or rather tiosjpice^ of the Grin- 
sel, where, in former times, a few good monks lived 
to furnish food and shelter to weary and benighted 
travellers, we made an excellent breakfast of bread 



and milk. Our patli for tlie rest of tlie day lay 
through the beautiful valley of the Aare, walled up 
on either side v/ith mountains of bald-faced rock. 
The river is repeatedly crossed by old, romantic, 
grass-grown stone bridges of a single arch ; and as my 
companion stopped two or three times to sketch these, 
I amused myself in the mean time by rolling boulders 
over the rocks which line the rapid, tumbling river, 
or plucking Alpine roses for my book of floral sou- 
venirs. We reached the falls of Handeck about noon, 
and, after dinner at a little chalet visited the fall, 
where the river comes pouring headlong down into 
an abyss two hundred and twenty-five feet deep. Our 
companions were in ecstasies ; but Warer and I, who 
had seen, not only Niagara, but the Ehine-fall, affect- 
ed superior knowledge, and treated it as a small af- 
fair. 

All through this wild and beautiful valley the 
scene was rendered still more picturesque by numer- 
ous mountain torrents falling in fleecy, sheety clearness 
from the heights above us, and scattering their spray 
around us as they fell. Warer, who had once made a 
trip to the Yosemite Yalley in California, had during 
all the former portion of our tramp, whenever I had 
expressed particular admiration for any grand feature 
of the scenery, been in the habit of dampening my ar- 
dor by giving his nose an upward inflection, and say- 



104 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

ing that "it was nothing to Yosemite." In fact, a 
little childish pettishness had grown np in both of iis, 
and I, in revenge, whenever I saw any thing on the 
route particularly uninteresting, retorted by asking if 
he had seen "any thing in Yosemite equal to that?" 
However, during that day in the Haslithal, this beau- 
tiful valley of the Aare, we dropped our hadinage in 
the presence of these grand old mountains and leap- 
ing cascades, and after that I heard no more of Yo- 
semite. 

We reached Meiringen a little after six o'clock, 
having made an actual day's travel of ten hours. We 
were already becoming old pedestrians, and it is real- 
ly astonishing how, after the first few days of a foot- 
tramp, one becomes hardened, and enabled to under- 
go a double quantity of fatigue. Although certainly 
a little tired, a good supper at the Krone and our 
usual change of stockings and shoes soon refreshed 
us so much that Warer proposed a walk of a mile or 
two up the valley to digest our dinner and give us an 
appetite for sleep. 

The next morning we started at six o'clock, but 
when about a quarter of a mile from the inn, Warer 
stopped to make a sketch. What children we are! 
I was impatient to proceed, and it seemed altogether 
too early in the morning for my companion to stand 
there, considering the long day's march before us. 



A TRAMP IN THE BERNESE OBERLAND. 105 

So, as he seemed to be absorbed in his work, I slowly 
continued my way np the mountain-path. We had 
said nothing to each other, but we both understood 
very well that there was a little difference of opinion 
as to who should be leader. I walked slowly on, 
thinking Warer w^ould soon follow me, until the 
mountain firs and" bushes shut him out from my sight. 
Then I regretted my hastiness, and sat down and 
waited for his coming; but an hour passed, and he 
came not, and so I proceeded, determining to wait 
again when I reached the summit of the mountain. 
I passed by the celebrated falls of the Eeichenbach, 
scarcely looking at them, for I knew I should not en- 
joy them alone, and hastened to reach the mountain- 
top, not even stopping to patronize the young woman 
who, in a little chalet on the mountain-side, for a few 
sous, enables Swiss travellers to say with truth that 
they have seen a chamois. 

On the summit of this mountain the eye rests upon 
a scene of grandeur which I do not believe is surpass- 
ed in Switzerland. The lofty Wetterhorn, shaped 
like a sugarloaf, and covered with pure snow, which 
seems at the distance to have been laid on evenly and 
smoothly like plaster, raises its head high above the 
two bare peaks of the Wellhorn and the Englehorn. 
The contrast between the snowy softness of the one, 
and the rugged, craggy gray of the others, is very 

5^ 



106 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

striking ; and the effect is heightened by the View at 
the mountain bases of a long stretch of fresh pasture- 
lands covered with chalets and herds of cattle. But I 
did not half enjoy this scene. My eyes would turn 
from it backward to the mountain-path I had ascend- 
ed, and up which I hoped every moment to see com- 
ing the tall figure of my companion. But he came 
not; and again bitterly regretting my hastiness, after 
waiting an hour with a really sad and heavy heart, I 
shouldered my pack, and, descending the mountain- 
side, crossed the pasture to Eosenlaui. 

There are some baths here, and the day being fear- 
fully hot, I was half inclined to rest, but I only stray- 
ed aside a few minutes to see the celebrated glacier 
remarkable for the purity of its ice and its blue color. 
jSTear its base lives an old man, who, as I approached 
it, followed me, and proposed that I should enter it. 
As the idea of entering a glacier was something new, I 
consented, and, mounting a ladder upon its side, soon 
found myself really in its interior, in a chamber twen- 
ty feet long and seven feet high, whose walls, floors, 
and ceilings were of clear, solid, blue ice. I found it 
damp and chilly though, and soon took my way up the 
mountain-side toward the summit of the great Schei- 
deck. 

As I climbed the steep and rugged mountain, in 
most places free from vegetation, and beneath the 



A TRAMP IN THE BERNESE OBERLAND. 107 

burning heat of a meridian sun, my ears were saluted 
with a sound which, though at first pleasant, from its 
frequent repetition soon became an intolerable nui- 
sance. All along these mountain-paths are men who 
keep a sharp lookout for travellers coming up or go- 
ing down. The moment one appears, the looker-out 
returns to his post and sounds the Alpenhorn — an in- 
strument of bark or wood, six or eight feet in length, 
whose notes are clear and silvery as those of a bugle. 
But it soon becomes to the traveller an instrument of 
torture, particularly as its blast is always followed by 
the importunities of the blower, who, hat in hand, per- 
sistently pleads for, or rather demands money for his 
artistic services. The whole of this day's route was 
strewn with beggars of every description. Little chil- 
dren with Alpenroses or berries clung to me and im- 
plored me to buy ; old men and old women, lame, 
halt, and blind, whiningly asked for aid ; and " Swiss 
maidens," whose rough, unhandsome faces, dumpy 
figures, and unpicturesque costumes, put to flight any 
romantic ideas I might have entertained in regard to 
them, came in troops to the roadside and held out 
their hands as I passed. The most impudent attempt 
at extortion was that of a fellow who, spying me from 
a distance, rose from the stone on which he was repos- 
ing, with a pick in his hand, and demanded pay for 
mending the road ! The road was of almost solid 



108 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

rock, and his pick scarcely could have, and certainly 
never had penetrated it. 

A little after noon I reached the Scheideck, ly- 
ing at the foot of the Wetterhorn, covered with eter- 
nal snow, and nearly twelve thousand feet in height. 
Here, after dinner, and a couple of hours rest, I start- 
ed down the mountain-side toward the lovely valley 
and glacier of Grindelwald. 

Where was my friend Warer, whom I had so has- 
tily quitted in the morning, all this time ? Had he 
become disgusted with Swiss travel and turned back, 
or had he lost his way in the mountains ? I began 
to be alarmed, and thought seriously of returning ; 
but, reflecting that the probability of finding him 
would be but slight, pursued my journey. When 
near the base of the mountain, and just as I was en- 
tering the charming little valley, what was my delight 
at spying Warer not far ahead, seated upon a rock, 
and making a sketch of the Wetterhorn. I overtook 
him as soon as possible. Between us no verbal apolo- 
gies were necessary. He had, it seems, taken another 
path up to the falls of Eeichenbach, and had preceded 
me about an hour. He finished his sketch while I 
rested, and then, just as the sinking sun was convert- 
ing the snow of the Wetterhorn into rich, yellow 
cream, we descended together into the village of 
Grindelwald. 



A TRAMP IN THE BERNESE OBERLAND. 109 

This lies directly at the foot of two extensive gla- 
ciers, which reach in some places within a few feet 
of the houses, and look as though they might some 
day bury the valley in their icy folds. 

In the morning Warer and I determined to make 
as much of an inspection of the lower or larger gla- 
cier as we could do with safety without a guide, as 
we had both egotistically determined to have nothing 
to do with this valuable and frequently indispensa- 
ble class of persons during our entire trip. 

On this occasion we came very near repenting our 
folly and seriously suffering for our egotism. Hav- 
ing reached the base of the lower glacier, which is 
here 3150 feet wide, at about ten o'clock in the morn- 
ing, we climbed over the mass of moraine — broken 
rocks and stones — which the moving glacier bears 
down in its course, and soon reached the ice itself. 
For some time we found no difficulty in picking our 
way across the small fissures, and over the little humps 
of this icy cataract, but soon discovered that we had 
better go no farther on the ice, as we were approach- 
ing broader and deeper fissures, and places more -diffi.- 
cult to pass. So we retraced our steps, and, reaching 
the foot of the glacier, decided that we would go up 
the mountain-path by the side of it, and obtain our 
view of it from a point less dangerous than the one 
we had been approaching. 



110 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

For a time the steep path which leads up the side of 
the glacier was plainly enough marked, but we strayed 
a little away from it to pluck some Alpine flowers, 
growing in wild luxuriance and in strange contrast 
by the side of this sea of ice, and often within a few 
feet of it. But in gathering our flowers we had lost 
our path, and for more than an hour looked for it in 
vain. Frequently we were obliged to cling to bushes 
and tree-limbs, and leap over fissures in the rock, 
where, had we missed our foothold, we should inevi- 
tably have fallen far down upon the glacier. How 
we wished then we had either remained quietly at 
Grindelwald, pursued our journey, or taken a guide I 
At length Warer, with his sharp eyes, found, or, as 
he modestly expressed it, " stumbled upon" the path, 
and, as rapidly as could be, we pursued our way 
downward, turning neither to the right nor the left. 

A little after one o'clock we left Grindelwald, and 
struck up the bleak path, on our way to the Wenger- 
nalp, at the foot of the Jungfrau.- For the first time 
on our trip, we heard and saw avalanches this aft- 
ernoon, while we were seated in a cool and shady spot, 
which we had reached after a tramp of more than an 
hour up the steep, barren, and treeless mountain. 
Suddenly a noise, somewhat similar to the beating of 
surf upon the beach, broke upon our ears, and started 
us both from our seats. Louder and louder it grew, 



A TRAMP IN THE BERNESE OBERLAND. Ill 

and looking off'in the distance, perhaps half a dozen 
miles away, we saw a cataract tumbling down the 
mountain-side, and carrying every thing in its path. 
This is the ice avalanche, caused by portions of a gla- 
cier becoming detached by the heat of the sun ; and 
this white cascade often consists of immense blocks of 
ice capable of sweeping away forests and villages. The 
latter, however, are seldom built in too close proxim- 
ity to these ice mountains. 

We reached the Wengernalp, directly facing the 
Jungfrau, a little before sunset. We had seen it in 
the distance for several hours, but now that we were 
fully before its face, it assumed a new majesty and 
beauty. Its cloud-piercing heights covered with their 
eternal shroud of snow; its two pure and gigantic 
peaks, the Silverhorn and the Schneehorn ; its lower 
slopes dotted with sparkling glaciers and fields of 
snow, all bewildered and amazed us. We could not 
find expression for tha full gratification of our senses 
of beauty and of grandeur, and gazed upon the Jung- 
frau in silence till the falling shades of evening shut it 
from our view. * 

A few moments after our arrival on the Wenger- 
nalp two travellers came up, who, it appeared, had 
hired a mule together, to convey their luggage from 
Meiringen. One was a German and the other a 
Frenchman, and neither understood scarcely a word 



112 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

of the other's language. After supper they under- 
took to reckon up the expenses of the past week's 
trip, during which time they had been travelling to- 
gether. The Frenchman, who had kept the accounts, 
presented the Grerman with a bill made out in French, 
of course, to all of which the Grerman assented, with 
the exception of one item. His travelling compan- 
ion told him over and over in his vernacular that this 
was for his share of the mule, but his Teutonic friend 
could not or would not understand. A happy idea 
suddenly struck Warer, who, seizing his pencil, 
sketched in a moment a large mule, which he exhib- 
ited to the German, and then with his knife cut it in 
two equal parts, giving one to each. It was plain as 
day, and the Teuton instantly comprehended that the 
charge was for his half of the animal, which Warer 
had so graphically pictured and divided. 

All that night we were frequently awakened by 
the thunders of the avalanches pouring down the 
sides of the Jungfrau. In the morning we took an 
early start, and descended into the picturesque little 
valley and village of Lauterbrunn^n, so shut in among 
the mountains that in July the sun does not rise till 
seven, and in winter not before noon. "We visited 
the Staubach, a fall of no great volume, but an un- 
broken one of 925 feet, and then taking the broad car- 
riage-road which leads along the banks of the Lut- 




SKETCH OF OUK TRAMP, 



A TRAMP IN THE BERNESE OBERLAND. 115 

schine, reached tlie beautifully situated straggling 
town of Interlaken a little after noon on the tenth 
day from that on which we climbed the hill above 
Horgen. 

Here our foot-tramp was to end. We had been 
ten days on the route, and during that time had seen 
the best part of the Bernese Oberland. Our expenses 
from Zurich to Interlaken were, seventy-eight francs 
each, or a little less than eight francs a day, and the 
pedestrian may easily travel anywhere in Switzer- 
land for this. We remained at Interlaken that after- 
noon, and the next morning Warer and I parted. I 
was to go back to Paris and to work, and he to make 
his 'way on foot in part, and in diligence in part, over 
the great St. Gothard into- Italy. His last letter to 
me is from Yenice, where he is still sitting modestly 
and hopefully, pencil in hand, at the feet of the great 
old masters. 




CHAPTER lY. 

IN THE "MONT CENIS " TUNNEL — THEOUGH THE 
HEAET OF THE ALPS. 

The great engineering Woric of the Century. — A Journey into the 
"Bowels of the Eartli."— San Michel.— The Village of Fourneaux, 
and its People. — Its beautiful Surroundings. — History of the En- 
terprise. — Anticipated Difficulties and Obstacles. — Map of the Tun- 
nel and its Vicinity. — The motive Power. — Air pressed into the 
Service. — The Operations commenced. — My Visit to the Tunnel. 
— Preparations for entering. — In the "Bowels of the Earth." — 
Darkness visible. — Breathing becomes difficult. — A Halt and Eest. 
— Among the Workmen. — An unpleasant Predicament. — The 
Blast. — The " Advanced Gallery." — The Construction and Action 
of the perforating Machines. — The Work performed by them. — 
First Sight of the " Aflfusto." — Immense Wear and Tear of Ma- 
terial. — Accidents. — Termination and Success of the Enterprise. 

rpHROUan the fertile vine hills, and over the 
-"- broad extended plains of Burgundy — by Dijon, 
Macon, Chamberry, Ouloz, and Aix, winding grace- 
fully around, and suddenly darting into and out of 
tunnels on- the borders of the lovely, lonely lake of 
Bourgy, and then along the banks of the Arc- — the 
railway train, in its progress from Paris toward Tu- 
rin, finally arrives at the little Savoyard village of 
San Michel. From this point the Italy-ward travel- 
ler now passes through the barren valley to Lansle= 



THE MONT CENTS TUNNEL. 117 

Bourg, at tlie foot of Mont Cenis, crosses this to Susa, 
and proceeds to Turin. In a year or two, if no un- 
foreseen event occur, this route will be materially 
changed, and travellers giving San Michel the go-by, 
and continuing in the railway carriage up the banks 
of the Arc, instead of scaling the Alps, will go rush- 
ing through their stony heart. 

I had left Paris provided with a ''permit " to visit 
the great Alpine tunnel and inspect the novel air- 
compressing machinery, and, having left the railway 
at San Michel, succeeded, with some difficulty, in pro- 
curing a rickety wagon to convey me to Fourneaux, 
about eight miles distant. It was late in the after- 
noon, and the lengthening shadows were rapidly 
crawling up the mountain-side, and departing sun- 
light was tinging the snowy summits with a rich 
creamy hue as we drove out of the village to the 
merry music of the grelots hung about the horses' 
necks. 

I satisfied myself, immediately on arriving at Four- 
neaux, that all the stories I had heard about the great 
work being stopped were the merest canards ; and, 
after partaking of a better dinner than I had supposed 
it possible to obtain in such an uninviting establish- 
ment, wearied with the long and tiresome journey, I 
retired to rest in the little auherge on the hillside near 
the tunnel's mouth; and the mountain torrent of Char- 



118 A^ AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

maix, which came tumbling directly beneath my win- 
dow, soon lulled me to sleep with its rude, monoto- 
nous music. 

The " Mont Cenis " tunnel, as the great engineer- 
ing work of the century is usually called, is a mis- 
nomer — Mont Cenis being distant at least sixteen 
miles from the French entrance at Fourneaux, and 
twenty from the Italian entrance at Bardoneche. The 
line of the tunnel passes beneath three peaks, re- 
spectively called the " Col Frejus," the " Grand Yal- 
"lon," and the " Col de la Roue," the first being upon 
the French, and the latter upon the Italian slope, and 
the Grand Vallou at nearly an equal distance between 
the two. Mount Cenis being the best known of any 
of the ranges in this vicinity, will doubtless continue 
to carry off the honors. In behalf, however, of modest 
merit, which the poet says "seeks the shade" (and, 
if this be true, the Col Frejus should possess an im- 
mense deal of that valuable quality, as it has certainly 
sought out about the " shadiest " position in the en- 
tire vallej^), I desire to put upon record its claim 
against the recognized one of its loftier and more as- 
piring neighbor. 

Fourneaux, I found a miserable little village in a 
narrow gorge of the valley of the Arc, built partly 
on the river-bank, but principally upon the hillside. 
Many of the inhabitants are afflicted with goitre^ with 



THE MONT CENIS TUNNEL. 119 

sore eyes, or idiocy. Nature here, wild and rugged 
as it is, is grandly beautiful. The Grand Yallon, the 
culminating point of the Col Frejus, beneath whose 
summit the tunnel is to run, raises its lofty snow-bon- 
neted head 11,000 feet above the level of the sea 
into the sky. By the side of it is Charmaix, its sum- 
mit now crowned with a recent fall of snow, which 
had whitened the trunks and branches of the mount- 
ain-firs growing up to its very top. Down the mount- 
ain reach the firs and the pines, darkly, almost black- 
ly green. Mingled with them are less hardy trees, 
their leaves ruddy with the hues of autumn, and 
fruit-covered barberry-bushes, which give a rich va- 
riegated color to the hillside. All around are piled 
up the Alps, rising one above the other ; and at either 
extremity of vision, looking up or down the valley, 
it seems shut in by these eternal mountains. 

Formerly all visitors who presented themselves at 
Fourneaux or Bardoneche were freely admitted to 
the tunnel without any formality, but, as the work 
advanced, the danger attending the entrance of stran- 
gers, and the annoyance thereby caused to the work- 
men, rendered it necessary that some more strict 
rule should be adopted. At present permissions are 
granted but for the fifth and twentieth of each month, 
and then only upon application to the ^^Direzione 
Tecnica del traforo delle AlpV^ at Turin. I found no 



120 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

difficulty in securing immunity from tlie strict appli- 
cation of this rule, and every facility was afforded me 
in the pursuit of my investigations by the local di- 
rector, the Chevalier Copello. 

It was not until several years after it was decided 
that the tunnel should be excavated that the work 
was actually commenced. In and out of the Italian 
Parliament it was ridiculed and opposed by scientific 
men, professors and laymen — all sorts of objections 
being made to its practicability, all kinds of horrible 
possibilities being imagined as obstacles in its way. 
Eock might be struck of so impenetrable a nature 
that the keenest-tempered instruments would be bat- 
tered and turned aside without making upon it the 
slightest impression ; so hard that charges of powder, 
no matter how heavy, would be blown from it as they 
would from the mouth of a cannon, without detach- 
ing or even shivering the surrounding mass. 

Immense subterranean caverns, and yawning 
chasms and abysses reaching down to Hades itself, 
might be encountered. Large lakes might be un- 
bosomed, and rivers might come pouring through fis- 
"sures in the rock, and not only drown all the work- 
men, but, rushing through the tunnel on either side, 
overwhelm the valleys of the Dora and the Arc. Fire 
itself might be encountered, and the workmen suffo- 
cated with poisonous gases. These were some of the 



THE MONT CENIS TUNNEL. 121 

imagined and imaginary difficulties in the way of the 
commencement and success of the enterprise. But, 
as the sequel will show, there were others of a much 
more practical, and therefore formidable nature, to 
be overcome. The usual mode of making tunnels is 
by sinking vertical shafts or wells at convenient dis- 
tances, and working through from one to the other. 
Here, however, that would have been utterly imprac- 
ticable. It was found that at a distance of 722 yards 
from the mouth, a well must have been 1000 feet in 
depth ; at 3000 yards, S593 feet ; and at 6333 yards, 
a vertical shaft must have been 5400 feet deep — a 
well which, by the ordinary processes, would require 
nearly forty years to dig. In case the shafts were 
made oblique instead of vertical, they would have 
been almost as long as the tunnel itself There was 
then but one way to open this, and that was by at- 
tacking it at the two ends — the mountain at its two 
opposite bases. But here arose another difficulty. 
How were laborers to be supplied with air at a dis- 
tance of more than three miles in the very bowels of 
the earth? In tunnelling by hand, fifty or sixty 
years would have passed away before the completion 
of the work, and some more rapid process must be ap- 
plied. Steam, the ordinary motive power, requires 
fire to generate it, and fire feeds upon air. It was 
evident that this could not be made use of, and that a 



122 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. ' 

new motive power must be applied. A happy com- 
bination of circumstances led to this result. 

An English engineer, named Bartlett, had invented 
a perforating apparatus, which being set in motion by 
steam-power, drove a drill like a battering-ram against 
the face of the rock, in time making a hole deep and 
large enough to be charged with powder. Three Ital- 
ian engineers, Messrs. Sommellier, Grrandis, and Grat- 
toni, were at about the same time experimenting upon 
compressed air as a motive power, with the immediate 
object of applying it to the propulsion of railway 
trains up a steep incline in the Apennines. It occur- 
red to these gentlemen that could a combination be 
made of their motive power and Bartlett's apparatus, 
the result would be precisely the machine for boring 
a tunnel through the Alps. The motive power would 
cost nothing, and, instead of consuming air, would 
supply it to the workmen. Years of labor and of 
thought were expended in contriving, combining, and 
experimenting; and the result has been the perfo- 
rating machine, moved by common air compressed to 
one-sixth its natural bulk, and consequently, when set 
free, exercising an expansive force equal to that of 
six atmospheres, which are now working their way 
through the Alps at the rate of three yards a day. 
The work was commenced by hand at Bardon^che 
in 1857, and continued till 1861, when the perforators 



ST. JEAN DE MAUBIENN 



SANMICUE 



% 



-c/^ 
^^^ "^^ 



"-%, 








SKETCH OF SITE OF THE TUNNEL. 



THE MONT CENIS TUNNEL. 125 

were introduced after about 900 yards had been ac- 
complished. It was not, however, until 1863 that the 
perforators were introduced upon the French side, the 
intermediate time having been occupied in erecting 
dwellings for the workmen, machine-shops, and all 
the appliances necessary for such an immense under- 
taking. 

The map on the opposite page shows the site se- 
lected for the tunnel. 

The Arc, rising in the Alps near Mont Cenis, pours 
down the valley which bears its name, and empties 
into the Isere near Chamouset. In ascending the 
narrow valley, it was found that near the hamlet of 
Fourneaux the river makes a bend in a southerly di- 
rection. Upon the other side of the Alps, in the val- 
ley watered by the Dora-Eiparia, the Dora, very ac- 
commodatingly, also makes a bend toward the north 
near Bardoneche ; and thus, at these two points, the 
Dora and the Arc make the nearest approach to each 
other in all their course. Here, in these two secluded 
little nooks, they seem to have had a fancy for mak- 
ing each other's acquaintance, and each have made ad- 
vances as far as not merely propriety but nature her- 
self permitted. But the rugged, frowning, unsympa- 
thetic Alps stood sentinel and barrier between them, 
and, roughly rejecting their cooing and wooing, turned 
them off again in different directions, each to pursue 



126 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

its course toward tlie miglity sea. This barrier skill, 
science, enterprise, and determination are rapidly 
breaking down; and, before many years shall have 
passed, we may reasonably hope that the Dora and the 
Arc, though not indeed permitted to mingle their wa- 
ters together in joy, will be firmly and forever united 
with bands of iron. 

It was owing to this proximity in the two, valleys 
at those points that Fourneaux upon the French, and 
Bardon^che upon the Italian side, were selected as 
the entrances and termini of the great Alpine tunnel. 
Here it was found that a straight line between them 
and through the Alps would measure only 12,220 
metres, or 13,577 yards — about seven and seven-tenths 
miles. Fourneaux and Bardoneche were also hap- 
pily situated for a convenient junction with the rail- 
ways already constructed, and the geological charac- 
ter of the mountain itself was found to be a favorable 
one for penetration. 

The first visit I made in the morning after my ar- 
rival at Fourneaux was to the air-compressing estab- 
lishment, situated half a mile from the. mouth of the 
tunnel, and on the banks of the Arc. Without dia- 
grams, and even with them, the reader would fail fully 
to comprehend the structure and action of the power- 
ful and delicate machinery here employed. Twenty 
iron pipes or tubes, giving the ensemble the appear- 



THE MONT CENIS TUNNEL. ' 127 

ance of a huge organ, stand upright at a height of 
thirty feet in the air ; in these, by an oscillating mo- 
tion caused by the rise and fall of water, common air 
is compressed to one-sixth its natural bulk. This rise 
and fall is caused by a series of pistons working in 
the tubes. As the piston ascends, it pushes the water 
before it, and this, in turn, compresses the air and 
chases it into a reservoir. As it descends, a valve 
near the top is opened, through which the common 
air rushes to supply the vacuum, and this, in turn, is 
compressed and pushed into the reservoir. The pis- 
tons are worked by water-wheels ; and thus one force 
which costs nothing is made to manufacture from the 
surrounding atmosphere a power which is now boring 
through the hardest rock. From the reservoir an 
iron pipe^^ eight inches in diameter, in sections eight 
feet in length, the joints being rendered air-tight by 
cushions of caoutchouc, and laid upon the tops of 
stone posts, conveys the compressed air along the 
roadside till nearly opposite the mouth of the tunnel, 
where, taking a sharp turn, it follows a steep incline, 
upon which a double-track railway is laid, up to the 
entrance. I followed the course of the pipe up this 
incline, upon which the " kangaroo wagons" (so called 
on account of their peculiar construction, the two 
front wheels being made lower than the hind ones, 
giving the wagon the appearance of a kangaroo) were 



128 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

mounting, heavily laden with stone cut for the ma- 
son-work of the tunnel. Four hundred and fifty- 
eight steep stone steps brought me up on a large arti- 
ficial plateau formed by the debris brought from out 
the excavation and shot down the mountain-side. 

Nothing seemed so surprising, and nothing could 
be so likely to astonish the general observer, as the 
fact that the mouth of the tunnel is at a distance of 
105 metres, or 840 feet above the level of the valley. 
The reason, however, is evident enough when the 
facts of the case are known. The two opposite val- 
leys of the Arc and the Dora differ in their heights 
above the level of the sea — the former being at an 
elevation of 1202 metres and a fraction, while the lat- 
ter has an elevation of 1335. A line, therefore, run 
straight from the base of the mountain on the Bar- 
doneche, or most, elevated side, would emerge upon 
the Fourneaux side at a distance of 182 metres above 
the valley. This difference is to be compensated for, 
and it is done by commencing the tunnel on this side 
at an elevation of 105 metres, and giving a much 
steeper grade from the north end to the centre than 
from the other, the grade in the one case being 0*022 
to the m^tre, and in the other but 0*0005. 

Arrived near the entrance of the tunnel, I deliver- 
ed my letter of introduction to Signore Genesio, the 
director of the workmen, who invited me into his 



THE MONT CENIS TUNNEL. 129 

bureau, where he^called my attention to a caoutcliouc 
coat reaching nearly to the heels, and which he re- 
commended me to put on. We then went to the 
mouth of the tunnel, where, each receiving from the 
custodian a lighted lamp, attached to a wire about 
eighteen inches in length, we commenced our journey 
into " the bowels of the earth." 

The entrance does not materially differ in appear- 
ance from that of ordinary railway tunnels. It is 
here built up and faced with solid masonry, and is 25 
feet 3 J- inches wide at the .base, 26 feet 2f inches at 
the broadest part, and 24 feet 7 inches high. A dou- 
ble railway track emerges from the mouth, and wag- 
ons loaded with debris ^nqtq coming out, and others, 
filled with cut stones for the mason-work, drills, and 
other working utensils, going in. As we entered, the 
only light we could see ahead was a gas jet blazing 
in the distance. Along either side of the tunnel here 
is a trottoir of flagstones, upon which we walked, 
lighting a path for our feet with the lamp which hung 
near them. The air-conduit is ranged along the side 
of the gallery, while in the middle of the tunnel, be- 
tween the two lines of rails, a canal has been dug, 
through which the gas and water pipes are conveyed 
to the end of the gallery. This canal is wide, and 
deep enough to afford a refuge for the workmen, and. 
a means of exit in case the tunnel should be filled by 

6* 



130 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

a fall of tlie crumbling rock above. " The masonry on 
either side was damp, and in many places little streams 
came trickling through it, and it occurred to me that 
in time this constant percolation must inevitably wear 
away the cement which binds the blocks of stone to- 
gether, and undermine the vault. Overhead the ma- 
sonry is not visible, nothing being seen but a wooden 
partition, dividing the tunnel into two equal galleries 
above and below. 'The object of this, which is only 
temporary, is to create a current, the rarified air from 
the lower gallery rising and rushing out through the 
upper, while fresh air comes into the lower one to 
supply its place. As yet, this partition extends only 
a short distance, and is not of much practical value. 
We passed the gas jet, and, looking before us, saw 
nothing but the most impenetrable darkness; and, 
looking behind, I observed the entrance gradually 
growing smaller, until after I had continually turned 
ai>d watched it till it had dwindled down to the ap- 
parent size of an apple, it suddenly dropped out of 
sight, as the sun sinks below the horizon in a calm 
summer sea. Peering then in either direction, I saw 
only impenetrable darkness. I use the word "saw" 
advisedly, for this darkness here in the bowels of the 
earth seemed to be palpable and ponderable; some- 
thing more than what the philosophers define as a 
mere absence of light ; something heavier and more 



THE MONT CENTS TUNNEL. 131 

solid than a negative — a real positive entity, which it 
seemed to me I could feel jpressing against and around 
me as, guided by the flaring flame of our lamps, we 
forced our way through it. Upon inquiring of my 
guide how far we had reached, he called my atten- 
tion to a little notch in the wall, where the distance 
was marked 1000 metres, or about two-thirds of a 
mile. 

A dull rumbling sound attracted my attention ; and 
in the distance, but seeming miles away, lights were 
dancing up and down in the murky air as the feu fol- 
let, or wildfire, dances and flits in summer evenings 
over marshes, bogs, and fens. These were the lamps 
carried by some workmen going out, and a wagon 
loaded with debris soon came rolling by us. Up to 
this time I had experienced no particular difficulty in 
breathing, a sensation only that the air was unnatural 
and dank, like that in a cellar. As we advanced, 
however, it began to grow hot and stifling, and we en- 
tered a thick yellow fog, redolent of the fumes of gun- 
powder, which indeed it was, seeking its way toward 
the mouth of the tunnel. This was very disagreea- 
ble, almost suffocating, producing a sensation of heav- 
iness upon the brain, a dull headache, and a fearful 
feeling of dread. As we walked on we saw lights 
again, dancing like fireflies in the distance, and soon a 
party of rough, half-naked, smoke-begrimed men, who 



132 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

loomed up in the fog like enormous giants as they ap- 
proaclied, passed ns on their way from work. 

About two miles from the entrance we came upon 
a little cabin, or barrack, built upon one side, and here 
my guide informed me that the completed portion of 
the tunnel on the French slope ended. Entering the 
cabin, and following his advice and example, I gladly 
removed coat and vest, covering myself again with 
the caoutchouc; and, picking and trimming our lamps, 
we darted again into the darkness. Up to this time 
it had been plain sailing, walking along with as little 
difficulty or obstacle as on a side-walk in a deserted 
street. Upon quitting this, however, we entered the 
gallery in corso di scavazione — that portion of the tun- 
nel which, having been opened by the perforating ma- 
chines, was now being enlarged by the ordinary hand 
process. Here there was no longer any trottoii\ and 
picking our way over piles of rocks, which looked as 
though they had been thrown in confusion by giants 
at play, dodging wagons passing in and out, passing 
groups of swarthy workmen, through an atmosphere 
yellow, thick, and stiiling, we at length came upon a 
group of men standing quietly, as if awaiting some- 
thing, in front of a heavy oaken door, which closed 
the passage in advance of us. My guide said we must 
stop here for the present. I imagined the cause, and 
selecting the softest, smoothest-looking rock, sat down 



THE MONT CEXIS TUXXEL. 1^5 

and meditated. Here was I, more than two miles 
from the mouth of the tunnel, with a mile of Alps 
piled above my head. The gallery was not more 
than ten feet wide and seven high, and its roof and 
sides were of jagged, sharp, protruding rocks, seeming 
to need but a slight shaking to send them tumbling 
down about our ears. Suppose they should tumble, 
and we be all buried alive in this hole in the earth ! 
Suppose some of the predicted rivers, or possible lakes, 
should find their way through some aperture just 
opened, and engulf us now ! Suppose the air-pipe 
should burst, or, worse still, the supply of air be stop- 
ped, and we all suffocated! Suppose— But the 
thread of my rapidly-crowding hypotheses was broken 
by a sudden sound, which might well, under all the 
circumstances, have appalled a braver and more firm- 
ly constituted man, and which for an instant made 
me believe that one of my suppositions was about to 
become a reality. Bang !— but not the sharp crack- 
ing '' bang" of a heated cannon, or the sound of a rock- 
blast in the open air— a dead, dull, rumbling explo- • 
sion, which reverberated through the gallery, and seem- 
ed to give the whole earth a shake. I started, and in- 
voluntarily looked up, as if expecting to see the stony 
roof give way and tumble. Bang! bang! bang! in 
rapid succession five or six other blasts were blown ; 
the oaken doors were opened, a huge gust of thick 



184 AN AMEEICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

yellow smoke and stifling black gunpowder came rush- 
ing toward us, when my guide touched me on the 
shoulder and said we could now proceed. I uttered 
an inward '^ thank Grod!" that I was really safe, and 
speedily sprang up and joined him. 

Passing beyond the heavy oaken doors, still care- 
fully picking our way over the stones through the 
gallery, growing lower and narrower at every step, 
through the smoke we soon discovered a brilliant 
blaze of gas, and heard a sharp hissing sound. Sud- 
denly we emerged from the heat and smoke, and were 
breathing an air fresh, sweet, exhilarating, and doubly 
grateful to the lungs, after the deteriorated material 
upon which they had been feeding. We were in the 
" advanced gallery " at the end of the tunnel, and be- 
fore us was the '■'' ajfustoj'' bearing its nine perforators, 
persistently striking and boring their way into the 
solid rock, scattering around them sparks of fire struck 
off at every blow. 

The gallery here is not quite nine feet in width, 
and but eight and a half in height. The affusto^ as the 
huge structure is called upon which the perforating 
machines are borne, and which bears precisely the 
same relation to them that the carriage does to the 
gun, nearly fills up the entire space. In order to ob- 
serve the action of the machinery, we were obliged to 
coast carefully along the side of this heavy wagon, and 



THE MONT CENTS TUNNEL. 135 

when arrived at the front, to wedge ourselves between 
it and the rock, with just space enough to stand in. 
Here the sights and sounds really became cheerful 
and pleasant. The gallery is brilliantly lighted ; the 
compressed air, a jet of which is constantly escaping 
from the conduit-pipe, is fresh, cool, and grateful to 
the wearied lungs; the constant rapid "thud" of the 
drill as it strikes the rock, the hissing sound of the es- 
caping air, the cries of the workmen to each other, 
sounding unnaturally loud in this pure air and con- 
fined space, all constituted a scene as exciting as it 
was strange. A feeling, of manly pride at the sight 
and action of these wonderful machines, in the opera- 
tion of which the powers of nature are made the slaves 
of man, seems to invade the soul. We forget that we 
are so far from daylight, and that four thousand feet 
of Alps are weighing above our heads. We forget 
danger, and banish fear; and the workmen, thirty- 
nine of whom are employed upon each affusto^ seem 
to have no idea of either. They perform their labor 
in this little hole with a remarkable sense of security. 
They seem to play with these huge machines — they 
put their hands upon and direct the steel bar which 
strikes the rock, and the powerful instrument which 
pierces the Alps glides between their fingers like a 
child's toy. They hop about like toads between the 
drills, perch themselves upon and under the various 



136 AN AMEEICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

parts of the monster macliine, and never seem to 
dream that at any moment some unknown, unlooked- 
for fissure in the rock may be discovered, and they 
crushed to atoms by the tumbling mass, or that this 
powerful agent, which they have made their slave, 
with its explosive force of six atmospheres, may some 
time burst its iron fetters and scatter death and de- 
struction around it. 

Each perforator, nine of which are at work, is en- 
tirely independent of every other, so that when one is 
placed hors de combat^ its inability to act does not af- 
fect the rest. It is much easier to describe the opera- 
tion of the perforator and its effects, than the compli- 
cated machinery by which it is set in motion. The 
motive power is conveyed to it from the conduit by a 
flexible pipe, which throws the compressed air into 
a cylinder placed horizontally along the affusto. In 
this cylinder a piston works back and forth, and to 
this piston is attached a fleuret, or drill, about three 
feet long, finely tempered and sharpened at the end. 
As the piston moves up and down, it of course drives 
the drill against the rock and interdraws it, and by a 
very delicate and complicated piece of machinery, a 
rotatory motion similar to that in hand labor is given 
to the drill itself. We arrived in the '' advanced gal- 
lery " at a very favorable moment, just as a new at- 
tack was about being commenced by a perforator. A 



THE MONT CENIS TUNNEL. 137 

drill was attached by a flexible joint to tbe piston-rod ; 
a workman standing upon tlie front end of the ma- 
chine held and directed this, as a gardener would the 
hose of a common garden-engine ; the compressed air 
was turned on by another workman at the hind end 
of the affusto^ and the drill commenced its rapid and 
heavy blows upon its formidable foe. " Thud !" 
" thud !" *' thud !" it goes, at the rate of two hundred 
times a minute. Two men mind this portion of the 
'apparatus — one to give the general direction of the 
drill, and the other, standing upon the ground, holds 
the end where it strikes the rock with a crooked iron, 
to prevent it from flying off from the desired point 
of attack. The force of each stroke of the bar is 90 
kilogrammes, or 198 English pounds ; and as the pis- 
ton moves back and forth, and consequently causes 
the bar to strike the rock at the rate of from 180 to 
200 times a minute, each drill, therefore, exercises 
upon the point of attack a force equivalent to 89,600 
pounds a minute. 

The rock upon which the perforators were at work 
when we entered was hard white quartz, the most dif- 
ficult to pierce which has yet been encountered. This 
layer was struck in the middle of June, and its pres- 
ence has materially retarded the progress of the tun- 
nel. Formerly, in the mica, hornblende, slate, and 
limestone through which they quarried, the perfora- 



138 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

tors made an advance of from one and a half to three 
yards a day. In this quartz they now make but from 
eighteen to thirty inches. A few figures will exhibit 
the rapid and decided reduction in the rate of prog- 
ress. In May the advance was 91 metres ; in June, 
when the first croppings of the quartz began to ap- 
pear, it was reduced to 4:9|- ; in July, to 16 ; in Au- 
gust, to 13 ; and in September, to 19-|- metres. It is 
supposed that there still remains a year's work in this 
quartz. 

In commencing a perforation, the first difficulty is 
making a hole sufS.ciently large to confine the drill. 
When this first strikes the rock it hits wide and wild, 
like a pugilist blinded by the blows of his adversary. 
When once fairly entered, however, it works back and 
forth, and rotates with great precision and regularity, 
a stream of water being conveyed into the hole by a 
flexible pipe to facilitate the boring. The nine per- 
forators are placed above, below, in the centre, and on 
the sides of the affusto^ so as to attack the rock at dif- 
ferent points and angles, upon a surface of seven 
square metres. About eighty holes in the ordinary 
rock, from thirty to forty inches in depth, and vary- 
ing in diameter from an inch and a half to three 
inches, are thus bored in preparation for blasting. In 
the quartz, however, in which the boring is now in 
progress, the holes are made but from seven inches 



THE MONT CENIS TUNNEL. 139 

to a foot in depth. Eight hours is -asually employed 
in the boring, and this being completed, the affusto is 
drawn back, and a new set of workmen, the miners, 
take possession of the gallery. The holes are charged 
with powder and tamped, the miners retire behind the 
oaken doors, the slow match is ignited, an explosion oc- 
curs, which sends its reverberating echoes to the very 
extremity of the tunnel ; the rock blown out is clear- 
ed away, the affusto is advanced again, and another set 
of workmen coming in, the perforators are set in mo- 
tion. And so this continues year in and out, week- 
days and Sundays, night and day. The thousand 
workmen employed upon either side are divided into 
three reliefs, each working eight hours and resting six- 
teen. But two days in the year, Easter Sunday and 
Christmas, are acknowledged holidays. And for this 
constant, difficult, and dangerous subterranean labor, 
accompanied with an oppressive heat and a poisonous 
atmosphere, with smoke and grime and dirt, the com- 
mon laborers receive but three francs a day, the more 
important and experienced ones four and five. 

The quartz rock is terribly destructive to the drills 
and machines, and the former are required to be 
changed every few minutes, the tempered ends be- 
ing battered and dulled after a few hundred strokes 
against the rock. In the comparatively soft material 
through which they have been passing there has been 



140 AN AMEEICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

an average of a hundred and fifty drills and two per- 
forators placed hors de combat for each metre of ad- 
vance ; and M. Sommellier estimates the number of 
perforating machines which will succumb in the at- 
tack, before the final victory is gained, at no less than 
two thousand. 

My guide and myself had now been wedged in be- 
tween the affusto and the rock for more than half an 
hour, and having seen and heard sufficiently, I pro- 
posed to leave ; and, taking our lamps, we commenced 
our " progress " backward. On our passage through 
the gallery of excavation, we were frequently stopped 
by wagons standing on the rail-track, which were re- 
ceiving loads of stone," let fall into them through traps 
cut in the partition previously mentioned, and which 
divides the tunnel into two galleries. I had a curi- 
osity to mount into this upper gallery ; and climbing 
a steep staircase cut in the rock, we soon entered it. 
Here was another strange sight : an immense stone 
chamber, with walls and roof of jagged stone, through 
which little streams of water were percolating, filled 
with smoke, through which the flickering light of the 
miners' lamps was dulled and deadened, a hot, fetid 
atmosphere, and a hundred black-looking men boring 
and drilling on every side, the platform covered with 
loose stones, the debris of the blast which we had 
heard on entering, and from the effects of which we 



THE MONT CENIS TUNNEL. 141 

were only protected by this oaken wall. "Are not 
accidents frequent here ?" I asked my guide. " Not 
very," he replied ; and told me that since the begin- 
ning of the work but aboiU forty men had been kill- 
ed by premature explosions, falling of the rock, b}^ 
being crushed under the wagons, and every other 
form of accident. The day after I visited the tunnel, 
upon the very spot where I stood in the " advanced 
gallery," a premature explosion occurred, caused by 
a spark struck from the rock while a miner was 
tamping a charge, resulting in the death of four 
men, and the blinding and serious maiming of six 
others. 

Over and among the stones, and down another 
steep ladder, and a short walk brought us to the little 
cabin where we had left our coats. These we were 
glad to put on again, as the air was already growing 
colder. In the gallery of excavation, the thermometer, 
summer and winter, ranges from 71° to 84° Fahr., 
and there is frequently a difference of 40° in the tem- 
perature of the interior and exterior of the tunnel. 
Over the trottoir we rapidly retraced our steps toward 
the entrance. This soon appeared in sight, and grow- 
ing larger and larger, we soon reached it, and emerged 
once more safe and sound into God's fresh, pure air, 
and saw before us and around us again the snow- 
crowned, fir-girdled Alps towering above the valley 



142 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

of the Arc. We had been more than three hours " in 
the bowels of the earth." 

The geologists and engineers now confidently pre- 
dict, unless some unforeseen obstacle occurs, that the 
tunnel will be opened from end to end in 1870. 

Yet there are not a few old croakers, who still 
believe that the " unforeseen obstacles " will yet be 
encountered, and bar the way of the perforator and 
affusto ; that harder rock may yet be struck ; that 
the subterranean caverns and yawning chasms and 
abysses may stretch beneath the very summit of the 
Grand Yallon ; that the rivers and lakes may yet 
burst forth and overwhelm and engulf workmen, tun- 
nel, and the valleys in which its either end debouches. 
In reply to all this, however, the geologists and engi- 
neers calmly assert that thus far their " diagnosis," if I 
may use the term, of the character of the mountain- 
chain beneath which the tunnel runs, has proved cor- 
rect, and that they have no reason to believe it will 
not continue so to the end. 

Let us hope that they are right, and the croakers 
all wrong, and that within the time predicted, on some 
fine morning, the miners upon either side may hear 
the steady, rapid "thud" of the drill, as it strikes 
upon the then only thin wall, upon the other • and 
that the affusto having been withdrawn, and the mine 
fired, when the smoke of the explosion shall have 



THE MONT CENIS TUNNEL. 



143 



cleared away, the lalDorers from Fourneaux and Bar- 
don^che, climbing over the debris^ may meet and 
shake their rough hands together, and mingle their 
rude voices in a shout of joy that their work is fin- 
ished, and that there are no more Alps. 




CHAPTEE V. 

THE QUARTIER LATIISr. 

My Residence and Mode of Life. — Occupations of Women in Paris. — 
Ladies taking the Degrees of " Bachelor" of Arts and Letters. — 
A Lady attempting to obtain a medical Diploma. — Quiet Life of 
my Concierge. — My Neighbor, little Aglae, the Flower-maker. 

WHEN I first came to Paris I took up my resi- 
dence in tlie Quartier Latin. Dear, charming 
old Latin Quarter ! Its quaint, narrow, sunless streets, 
and queer, dilapidated houses, are rapidly disappear- 
ing before the pick and shovel of modern improve- 
ment. There still remain within its classic precincts, 
however, those institutions of learning which have at- 
tained a world-wide reputation. It is yet the favorite 
home of art, science, and lore of every description ; 
still the abode of literary and artistic Bohemians and 
enthusiastic youth ; and, of all portions of Paris, the 
one in which a meditative, pensive, thoughtful man 
most delights to stroll. It is a free, independent life, 
that of a single man in Paris, and I can not perhaps 
convey a better idea of it than to give my readers a 
little insight into my own. During the five years that 
I resided in the Latin Quarter I lived, in utter disre- 



THE QUARTIEE LATIN. 146 

gard of the opinion of "Mrs. Grundy," in the third 
story front. The view from my window was delight- 
ful ; for I looked into a room on the opposite side of 
the street, full of good-natured, giggling grisettes^ who 
plied their needles all day as busy as bees. Below 
them was a carpenter's shop, from which issued early 
in the morning, breaking upon my matutinal slum- 
bers, the soft, delicious music of a saw and hammer, 
assisted by a parrot, who had learned to imitate the 
sawing and hammering wonderfully. My room con- 
.tained a large cabinet de toilette^ in which I took my 
bath. The bed stood in an alcove which might be 
shut off by curtains. The room was furnished with 
a sofa, four chairs, a secretary, centre-table, side-table, 
book-case, and clock — one of those wonderful French 
clocks which never go : there was no carpet, but, in 
lieu of that, a clean floor of oak, which the gargon 
danced or skated over once a week, with a pair of 
waxed brushes attached to his feet. For all this lux- 
ury I paid fifty francs a month rent, and five francs 
service to the gargon who made up my room. 

For be it known that, in most of the inaisons meu- 
Uees and small hotels in Paris, the chamberwork is 
done by men instead of women. On the other hand, a 
great many more avenues are open here to female en- 
terprise, skill, talent, and industry than in England or 
the United States. In Paris, women engage in occu- 
• 7 



146 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

pations which would be considered decidedly " out of 
their sphere " in either of the above-named countries. 
In the retail shops, the larger portion of the attendants 
are girls, and in most of them a woman is the book- 
keeper. Women are employed, indeed, as book-keep- 
ers in some of the large wholesale establishments, and 
are said to make excellent accountants. In all the 
cafes and restaurants women are engaged as general 
supervisors and to keep the books ; in nearly all the 
butchers', grocers', and bakers' shops the wife of the 
proprietor keeps the accounts and receives the moneys. 
In many, if not the majority of the theatres, the ticket- 
ofiices are kept by women, as are they also at many 
of the railway stations. In the country, women work 
in the fields and drive carts, and sow and hoe and 
reap. In Paris, cases of ladies following the courses 
of lectures at the Sorbonne or the College de France, 
and obtaining their degrees as ^'Bachelors" of Arts 
and Sciences and Letters, are by no means uncommon. 
A young lady named Keugger, a native of Algeria, 
who, having received a diploma as " Bachelor of Let- 
ters," after passing a brilliant examination, applied 
some time ago to the Dean of the Faculty of Medi- 
cine at Montpellier for permission to pursue the regu- 
lar medical course. This was refused on account of 
her sex, and she then appealed to the Minister of 
Public Instruction, who, without committing himself 



THE QUARTIEE LATIN". 147 

regarding the general principle, proposed as a com- 
promise that the applicant should agree to confine her 
practice to Algeria, among the female Arabs, who, it 
seems, more sensitive than the dames of more culti- 
vated societies, decidedly object to the manipulations 
of male physicians. The young lady refused to com- 
promise, and threw herself on her "reserved rights." 
The case was referred directly to the Emperor for his 
adjudication, and the friends of the young lady, and 
of woman's rights in general, insist that the monarch 
who made Eosa Bonheur a "chevalier" can not deny 
Mademoiselle Eeugger the privilege of becoming a 
physician. 

But to return to my life in the Latin Quarter. At 
eight o'clock Frangois brought me a bowl of delicious 
coffee and a single roll ; and this first breakfast I ate 
as Parisians do, in bed. Then, in dressing-gown and 
slippers, I read or wrote till nearly noon, when I went 
to breakfast : a good substantial one, consisting of two 
or three courses — beefsteak, fish, chops, bread, vegeta- 
bles, and half a bottle of red wine ; then to a reading- 
room, where for three francs a month one has the 
privilege of seeing all the Parisian, and most of the 
provincial journals ; then crossing the garden of the 
Tuileries, I strolled on the Boulevards or Champs 
Elysees till dinner, which came at six. In the even- 
ing, friends, the theatre, concert, or lecture. At elev- 



148 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

en I usually went home. My door was fastened, but 
upon ringing a bell it flew open as if by magic. What 
a quiet, peaceful life must have been that of my 
concierge and gargon, Frangois ! He slept in a little 
box at the end of the entrance, at the foot of the stair- 
case, and from ten o'clock at night, when the door 
was shut, till six in the morning, when it was opened, 
he was obliged to respond to every ring of the bell 
by pulling a cord at his bedside, which opened the 
door and admitted the lodger. As the young men 
who reside in the Quartier Latin are not generally ad- 
dicted to early hours, their incomings, strewed along 
the whole night, must, I should suppose, have, seri- 
ously interfered with the dreams of Frangois. It is 
to be hoped that, having become accustomed to it, he 
pulled the cord mechanically, without even waking. 
At all events, he looked rosy and jolly, and saluted 
me every morning in his Auvergnat ^atois^ which 
bears about the same relation to French that the dia- 
lect of the Cornish miners does to the language of 
Macaulay or Byron. 

In these Parisian lodging-houses one is entirely 
independent of his neighbor, and one may live for 
years in a house without knowing the occupant of the 
next room. On the floor below me lived a young 
student and the cheerer of his, otherwise, solitary lot, 
a young person rejoicing in a very flaming bonnet 



THE QUARTIER LATIN. 149 

and yellow ribbons, whom I had occasionally seen 
indulging in wliat I should conceive a highly un- 
feminine style of Terpsichorean gymnastics at the 
Closerie de Lilas. She and the student were evident- 
ly married, as they say in Paris, ''in the Twenty- 
first Arrondissement." And yet my neighbor with 
the glaring hat and yellow ribbons, and her student- 
lover, with his seedy coat and unkempt hair, seemed 
quite as happy as a great many couples I have met 
in life whose unions were duly blessed by " book and 
candle." 

In the back room, opposite mine, lived a little 
flower-maker, Aglae, and her mother. The pretty 
patient little creature plied her busy fingers from day- 
light in the morning often till the night was far spent; 
for with the two or three francs a day which she earn- 
ed, she found it difficult to support herself and her 
poor mother, who was confined to her bed half the 
time with rheumatism. One day, shortly after I first 
moved into the house, I heard a tap at my door, and, 
opening it, found this pretty little girl standing there. 
She had heard that I was an etr anger ^ and Frangois, 
who never could get it out of his stupid head that all 
etrangers came to Paris to study medicine, had told 
her that I was a doctor, and she wanted me to come 
in and see her mother, who was laid up with one of 
her rheumatic attacks. I undeceived her as to my 



150 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

profession, but, finding her mother was really very ill, 
sent for a medical friend, whose treatment greatly re- 
lieved her. After that little Aglae and I became 
great friends, and many a long winter evening I sat 
in their humble, ill-furnished room, reading to and 
talking with them, while little Aglae worked away at 
her roses and lilies. Her "young man," the grain- 
seller's son in the next building, who took her to the 
gallery of the Porte St. Martin or the parterre of the 
Bobino on Sunday evenings, told Aglae that she 
must not be so agreeable to the etr anger ; but this did 
not prevent her, when I was ill for a week, from 
bringing her work into my room, and chirping away 
in her cheerful manner as blithely as a bird. Then it 
was all arranged that when I received the hundred 
thousand francs, which was the first prize in the 
Montenegrine lottery, in which there were several mil- 
lions of tickets, of which I possessed four, costing five 
sous each, Aglae was to have a dot of I won't say how 
many francs, and was to marry the grain -seller's son, 
and I was to be one of the groomsmen, and the old 
lady was to live with them, and a plate was to be set 
for me every Sunday, and the -grain-seller's son was 
to have a shop of his own, and we were all to be as 
happy as possible. 

Dreams — dreams — ! We saved her delicate little 
body from the horrors of the fosse commune ; and now 



THE QUARTIER LATIN. 151 

when I stray into the cemetery of Mont Paraasse, my 
feet involuntarily lead me to a little green grave fra- 
grant with springing violets. Upon the headstone 
three wreaths of immortelles are hanging, and beneath 
them is chiselled the name of " Aglae." 




CHAPTER VI, 

WHAT THE PARISIANS EAT. 

Snail-eating.— History and Habits of the Snail.— Cost of living in 
Paris.— Cheap Restaurants.— Horse-eating.— Bill of Fare of a 
Horse-dinner.— Tables d'hote.— First-class Restaurants.— Cre- 
meries.— " Etablissements de Bouillon. "—How the Parisian Poor 
furnish their Tables. 

THE people of Paris, although many of them are 
obliged to live in an exceedingly frugal manner, 
in the aggregate eat a great deal. They consume an- 
nually about seventy million pounds of meat, two mil- 
lions of dollars' worth of sea-fish, five millions of dol- 
lars' worth of poultry and game, ten million eggs, and 
an incalculable quantity of vegetables and snails. 
Yes, snails ! those slimy molluscs, which thrive in 
damp gardens and vineyards and love the mould and 
moss which gathers on stone walls and " around dead 
men's graves." These may be seen in the windows 
of the cheaper eating-houses in Paris, where they are 
exposed as a tempting bait, and they may also be 
procured at some of the first-class restaurants. The 
man who first dared to eat an oyster was, no doubt, a 
hero deserving immortality; but what extraordinary 



WHAT THE PARISIANS EAT. 158 

courage must he have had who made the first essay 
upon these slippery gasteropods^ now so much esteem- 
ed in the cuisine of the "most refined nation of the 
world!" Who he was, or where he made the heroic 
"gulp" which gave a new sensation to his palate, we 
shall probably never know, for snail-eating dates from 
a remote period. Pliny, indeed, mentions one Fulvius 
Hirpinus, who cultivated the snail, as well as a taste 
for him, and who constructed a grand snailery, in 
which he fattened his pets with boiled barley, and 
served them wine to drink spiced with aromatic 
herbs. In the time of Pliny, snails, imported from 
abroad, were a popular article of food in Eome ; those 
coming from Sicily, the Balearic Isles, and Capri be- 
ing, esteemed as highly as in these degenerate days 
are "Chicaroras," "Blue Points," "Princess Bays," 
and "East Elvers." 

During many centuries the fattening of snails for 
the table has been a profitable business on the Conti- 
nent, the monasteries and convents having almost the 
entire monopoly of this commerce. Addison has re- 
lated his visit to the snailery of the Capuchin con- 
vents of Ulm and Fribourg, where the delicate crea- 
tures were kept in shady court-yards, and furnished 
with mossy stones to lounge upon, and favorite plants 
on which to feed, while above the walls and around 
them a net was stretched to prevent the lively animals 

7* 



154 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

from too freely indulging their vagabond propensities 
and straying away from home. 

The snails consumed in France come mostly from 
the ancient provinces of Burgundy, Champagne, and 
the Franche Comte, where they are gathered from the 
grape-vines, of the leaves of which they are particu- 
larly fond. The original producers sell them in the 
Paris market for about twelve sous a hundred, and 
the marketmen retail them at from one to two francs, 
according to size. After boiling in the shell, which 
is then stopped up with a batter made of butter, eggs, 
herbs, and pepper, the animal is drawn out and eaten, 
batter and all. I tried a dozen one day. Abstractly 
speaking, they are not bad, but upon my uncultivated 
taste a flavor intruded itself which seemed a cross be- 
tween that of a clam and a cockroach. 

The snail of Burgundy, in learned parlance the 
'^ Helix pomatia,'^ or the "Burgundy oyster" of the 
vernacular, is the largest and finest, being about two 
inches in length, and very fat and succulent. This 
snail is common in the north and centre of France, 
where it is found upon the vines, in the woods, and on 
the hedges. It does not exist at all in the south of 
France, although among the Eoman ruins of Provence 
its shell is often met with, from which it is inferred that 
the luxurious Eomans introduced it there for their 
own use. The Helix pomatia is considered the hardi- 



WHAT THE PARISIANS EAT. 155 

est, and at the same time the most palatable and 
profitable of the snail family, though there are several 
other species, which are more or less prized by gas- 
tronomers. In the south of France is found the Helix 
aspersa^ a spotted variety, being the common garden 
snail; the Helix nemorosa^ the wood snail, very com- 
mon in Languedoc ; the Helix lactea^ the white snail, 
and the Helix vermiculata^ commonly known in Prov- 
ence as the mourgette^ or '' little nun," a title given it 
on account of its retiring habits. At Marseilles, the 
Helix pisana^ or Pisa snail, is very much esteemed. 
It is a pretty little snail, with a bright yellow shell, 
over which brown bands are drawn. This is the snail 
for the amateur to commence with ; it has a much less 
formidable appearance than the big vomatia^ the oys- 
ter of Burgundy. 

It must not be supposed that snails are gathered 
at hazard, and cooked and eaten without undergoing 
careful inspection. The police authorities of Paris — 
who protect the stomachs of the citizens from the de- 
bilitating effects of watered milk and wine, who are 
sufS.ciently familiar with comparative anatomy to be 
able to distinguish readily between a rabbit and a cat, 
even though the latter may be enveloped in the skin 
of the former — the efficient police — who keep a sharp 
look-out for calves and cattle that never gave up the 
ghost ''in the regular way;" who know at a glance 



166 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

the difference between mushrooms and toadstools — 
the police authorities do not permit the members of 
the great snail family to pass the city gates of Paris 
without a passport certifying to the locality in which 
they waxed fat. It is well known that the snail has 
a great predilection for poisonous plants, and botanical 
gardeners have much trouble in preserving from his 
voracity the belladonnas, the lobelias, the mandrago- 
ras, and the tobaccos, of all of which he is particular- 
ly fond. Prudence, then, would suggest, that one in- 
clined to eat should first inquire respecting the early 
youth, and riper age, and dietetic habits of his in- 
tended victim. The snail should never be swallowed 
until he has been submitted to a few days' fast, or 
during the winter, when he is in a torpid condition, 
and when he does not eat at all. 

At the approach of winter the snail seeks the holes 
and chinks of old walls, and, with the view of still 
better protecting himself against currents of cold air, 
he closes the opening of his shell with a window 
formed of mucus, which, drying and hardening by 
exposure, affords him a perfect protection ; retiring 
then into his house, which for convenience' sake he 
always carries upon his back, the snail lies patiently, 
dozing and dreaming, in his hole in the wall, till the 
warm sunshine and melting air tempt him out again, 
to browse upon the springing leaves. 



WHAT THE PARISIANS EAT. 157 

One can live in Paris in all sorts of styles, and at 
all sorts of prices ; and one of the great pleasures of 
life in the French capital is the perfectly independent 
manner in which one can lodge and eat, without fear 
of " Mrs. Grundy." A large portion of the people 
take their meals at restaurants, breakfasting from 
nine to twelve, and dining usually from five to eight. 
Families who ha.ve their own apartments avoid the 
trouble and care of cooking by eating abroad. 

There are two principal classes of restaurants: — 
those which furnish meals at a fixed price, and those 
where one may breakfast and dine a la carte. All 
the best and most fashionable places are in the latter 
category, and the charges at some of them are very 
exorbitant. But there are cheap places, and plenty 
of them ; and as a fair sample of the cheapest class of 
eating-houses, which are at all decent, where meals 
are furnished at a fixed price, I give below a trans- 
lation of a little bill, thrust into the hands of pedes- 
trians upon all the bridges of Paris, and which is the 
advertisement of a restaurant, a large number of 
which exist here, patronized mostly by students, 
workmen, grisettes^ literary Bohemians, and other poor 
fellows whose purses do not always correspond either 
with their taste or appetite. La voila! 

Breakfast at 14 sous : A soup — a plate of meat — a 
plate of fish or vegetables — a dessert — a quarter bot- 



158 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

tie of wine, and bread " at discretion." For sixteen 
sous one may have a half-bottle of wine, or a bottle of 
beer. 

Dinner at\^ sous : A soup — a plate of meat with 
vegetables — a plate of vegetables — a dessert — a quar- 
ter-bottle of wine, and bread "at discretion." For two 
sous more, one may have two plates of meat. 

Dinner at 21 sous: A soup — two plates ''at choice" 
— half a bottle of wine or a bottle of beer — a dessert, 
and bread at discretion. 

Dinner at 25 sous: A soup — three plates " at choice " 
—half a bottle of wine — a dessert, and bread " at dis- 
cretion." 

So — with the two sous which, the waiter always ex- 
pects to be left at the side of the plate, and which at 
all the restaurants is placed by the waiters in a com- 
mon receptacle and divided at night — one can break- 
fast, after a fashion, at sixteen sous, and dine for eight- 
een. A very hungry man might fail to satisfy the 
cravings of his " inner nature " at one of these meals, 
as the portions are rather diminutive (sometimes, too, 
I suspect, like Kogers's wine, " very little for their 
age ") ; and a connoisseur in wines would certainl}^ not 
visit one of these establishments more than once. 

In the course of the punishment to which I sub- 
mitted my stomach, while experimenting at the vari- 
ous Parisian restaurants, I witnessed at one of these 



WHAT THE PARISIANS EAT. 159 

places, while breakfasting one morning, a little speci- 
men of the economical habits of the French people, 
which, however creditable to them, would certainly, 
had no other cause for the adoption of such a rule 
existed, have led me to withdraw my patronage, final- 
ly and forever, from that establishment. I had been 
indulging in an exceedingly nutritious, palatable, and 
favorite dish of mine, called " tete de veau d TliuileJ^ 
and, with my extravagant notions, had made the sad 
remains of that unfortunate calf's intelligence liter- 
ally swim in a lake of oil and vinegar. The meat 
soon disappeared under the sharpening influence of 
an excellent appetite, but a large portion of the unc- 
tuous compound in which it had been seasoned I left 
upon the plate, and ordered the second dish to which 
I was entitled. The waiter looked at the ocean of oil 
and vinegar in which the calf's head had been im- 
mersed, and then he looked at me with a mixture of 
wonder, scorn, and an expression which seemed to 
say, '' Not much made off that dish of tete de veau a 
Hhuile^ Then he called another waiter, and they 
both looked at the dish, and then both' looked at me ; 
and then the first waiter said something to the second 
waiter sotto voce^ and handed him the plate, with 
which — holding it very carefully, so that not a drop 
of it should be spilled, and giving me a withering 
look in his transit — he started for the kitchen. I 



160 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

knew, at first thouglit, the fate of that greasy com- 
pound ; it was not thrown away ; that would not have 
accorded with the French idea of " economy," and 
particularly with the economy of cheap restaurant 
keeping. It was, of course, mixed into some other 
mess in the kitchen, and I should not hesitate to af- 
firm my belief, which no amount of persecution 
would force me to relinquish, that other individuals, 
beside the calf and myself, had a taste of its quality. 
I sincerely trust that the guest who was fortunate 
enough to get it appreciated my masterly method of 
making sauce piquante for iete de veau a Vhuile. There 
are those who insinuate that, at these cheap restau- 
rants, horse and cat are served up under the name 
and guise of beef and rabbit, but of this I do not be- 
lieve a wordo 

The flesh of horses, however, is eaten in France, 
and is sold in the shambles, like other meat, in every 
arrondissement of Paris, where horses, killed on account 
of incurable wounds, or any other cause which would 
not disease the flesh, are cut up and sold. The late 
distinguished savant^ Isidore Geoffrey St. Hilaire, was 
an enthusiastic supporter of the '' hippogastric " the- 
ory and practice. He contended that it was only an 
" absurd prejudice " which prevented people from eat- 
ing horse-flesh, and that it was quite as palatable and 
nutritious as beef Some years since M. St. Hilaire 



WHAT THE PARISIANS EAT. 161 

gave a dinner to a number of his brother savants^ at 
which horse, in all possible styles of cooking, was 
served up ; last year a grand hippophagic banquet 
was given at the Grrand Hotel in Paris, under the aus- 
pices of the society for the protection of animals. 
An ill-natured anti-hippophage might be inclined to 
suggest that it was a droll way of " protecting " an 
animal to eat him ; but this is exactly what the so- 
ciety did on this occasion. There was horse soup, 
boiled horse, filet de horse, roast horse, hashed horse, 
and, finally, horse liver with truffles, of all of which 
the company partook, and pronounced it excellent. 
The tickets for this dinner were sold at fifteen francs, 
which is just fourteen francs and a half more than an 
unconscious dinner of horse-meat would cost in one 
of the cheap restaurants of the Quartier Movffetard^ 
and yet there were present no less than one hundred 
and twenty persons, representing the learned profes- 
sions, and nearly every rank in life. 

After the guests had partaken of the beast, the di- 
rector of the veterinary school at Alfort, under whose 
direction the banquet was provided, informed them 
that the animals, of which they had been tasting the 
quality, were not young, fat, and fresh horses, but old, 
excessively lean, and worn out with labor. The ani- 
mals killed for the feast were respectively thirteen, 
seventeen, and twenty -three years of age. 



162 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

The bill of fare of a horse dinner is a novelty. 
Here is that of the one referred to : 

Potage. 

Yermicelli au consomme de cheval. 
Hors d'oeuvre de table varies. 

BeUves. 
Saumon, sauce Hollandaise. 
Cotlette de clieval boulli, gamie de choux. 
Clieval, en boeuf a la mode. 

Entrees. 
Hachis de clieval, a la Menagere. 
Poularde, sauce supre'me. 

Rotis. 
Filet de clieval bigarre, sauce Xeres. 
Pate de foie de clieval aux truffes. 

It is not, of course, the desire of the hippoph agists 
(who number in their ranks some of the most learned 
men in France) to substitute horse-flesh for that of 
cattle, but simply to overcome the " absurd preju- 
dice," so that horses killed in battle, or by accident, 
or which are killed by their owners when the}^ be- 
come useless on account of broken limbs, or from oth- 
er causes not affecting their general health, can be 
made of use. In spite, however, of the labors of the 
savants^ it will probably be a long time before the "ab- 
surd prejudice " against horse-eating, and which, sin- 
gularly enough, extends to cats, dogs, rats, and other 
" small deer," will be overcome. 



WHAT THE PARISIANS EAT. 163 

In the Palais Eoyal, and scattered all over Paris, 
are restaurants at a fixed price, where a breakfast, 
consisting of two dishes and a dessert, half a bottle of 
wine or a cup of coffee, may be had for twentj-five 
sous, and a dinner composed of a half-bottle of wine, 
soup, three dishes selected from the bill of fare, and a 
dessert, for two francs. Besides these are many tol- 
erably cheap restaurants d la cai^te^ where a good din- 
ner may be made at from two to five francs. As a 
rule, any one living in Paris, and desiring to practice 
economy, should dine either at a restaurant at a " fixed 
price," or at a " table d^tioter 

All the first-class, and most of the ordinary ho- 
tels, furnish a table dUiote dinner, at which other than 
guests of the house may dine. From that of the 
" Grrand Hotel," served in the most gorgeous public 
dining-room in the world, down to the dinner set be- 
fore poor students at twenty-one sous in the Latin 
Quarter, there is, as in restaurants, a wide range, offer- 
ing a great variety of price as well as fare. At the 
" Grand Hotel " the price of dinner, including vin or- 
dinaire^ is eight francs ; at the Hotel du Louvre it is 
seven; at Meurice's, six, exclusive of wine; and at 
the hotels a grade below these, the price is usual- 
ly five francs, with wine. Then there are many 
excellent dinners served at four, three, and two 
francs and a half, at the smaller hotels, and even 



164 AN AMERICAN" JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

for two francs, with the usual fee of two sous to the 
waiter. 

Of the first-class restaurants in Paris, at which meals 
are served a la carte ; and where the prices are high, 
there are some which have acquired a world-wide rep- 
utation for the excellence of their cuisine and the su- 
periority of their wines. Among these are the Maison 
Doree. the Cafe Riche^ and the Cafe Anglais^ PMlippes^ 
and Yefours. At these places, where every thing is 
served in the most elegant manner, a dinner for a sin- 
gle person, such as a man of taste and appetite would 
select, costs from ten to thirty francs. In addition to 
the bill, it is customary to give the waiters 2^ pour 
hoire^ at the rate of a sou upon each franc spent. In 
the Parisian cafes and restaurants the waiters are not 
paid by the proprietor, and, indeed, in many cases, 
they purchase from him the privilege of serving in 
his establishment, depending entirely upon the cus- 
tomer for their reward. 

Besides all these, there is another class of eating- 
houses, whiph abound in the Latin Quarter, and which 
are extensively patronized by students, artists, and 
literary Bohemians, on account of their cheapness. 
These are little places called " cremenes," where a 
big bowl of coffee, or chocolate, or boiled milk, or 
milk boiled with rice, is served for four sous, with 
rolls at a sou each, and a little pat of fresh butter for 



WHAT THE PARISIANS EAT. 166 

another sou. A beefsteak may be had for eight, and a 
mutton-chop for six sous more, and a couple of eggs for 
five ; so that at a cremerie a very decent breakfast may 
be made for fourteen or fifteen sous, and at many of 
these places a moderate dinner may be had for a franc. 
Within a few years a new class - of eating estab- 
lishments, which are patronized by all classes, has 
sprung up in Paris, These are the etahlissements de 
houillon — literally, '' soup-houses " — although all the 
ordinary dishes which constitute breakfast and dinner 
are served in them. In these places the cooking is 
all done in the eating-room — an inclosed s'pace, usual- 
ly in the centre of it, being appropriated for this pur- 
pose ; and here the different messes are cooked in 
coppers, polished and shining like mirrors. The best 
of these establishments are conducted by a butcher, 
named Duval, who has no less than ten of them in 
different parts of Paris, in which he is said to furnish 
food to at least twenty thousand people daily. The 
finest and most extensive of Duval's establishments is 
in the Eue Montesquieu, just back of the Hotel du 
Louvre. The room is an immense one, capable of 
dining a thousand people at a time, with upper galle- 
ries extending entirely around it, and a large space 
in the centre appropriated to the cooking department, 
presided over by a number of neatly -dressed girls. 
Here, as in all these places, a perfect system of check? 



166 AN AMEKICAN JOUKNALIST IN EUROPE. 

and balances exists to prevent mistakes, and insure 
honesty on the part of the employes. Upon enter- 
ing the door, a man sitting at a counter hands the 
customer a little printed bill of fare with the price of 
each dish attached, from which he orders his meaL 
As each dish is ordered, the waiter who brings it 
checks it off from the bill. When the meal is fin- 
ished, the customer, in going out, hands the bill to a 
woman sitting at another counter. She adds up the 
amount, and, when it is paid, stamps the bill. The 
customer then takes it, and is required to deliver the 
bill at the door. 

In these places excellent soup is served at four 
sous a bowl, vegetables at four sous a plate, and roast 
meats at seven and eight sous. A napkin, if used, is 
charged one sou, but if not used, is taken away un- 
charged for. In some of Duval's establishments girls 
are employed as waiters, and one of these kitchen-res- 
taurants is well worth a visit to those who are at all 
curious in the gastronomic art. 

In one corner of the Holies Centrales^ one of the 
finest market-houses in the world, covering the space 
which was formerly the "Cemetery of the Innocents," 
is a queer collection of stalls, at which hundreds, and 
possibly thousands of the poor of Paris purchase their 
daily provisions. These stalls are supplied with the 
debris of the restaurants and hotels — pieces which 



WHAT THE PARISIANS EAT. 167 

palled upon the appetite of the guest, or were found 
too tough for mastication, or which, for some good 
reason, even a French cook was not able to disguise 
and convert into a palatable dish. These are all as- 
sorted in plates, and ranged along the stall in rows for 
the inspection, choice, and purchase- of the hungry 
poor. Here is a dish of cold boiled beef cut up in 
conveniently small pieces, and looking dry and blue ; 
next to it a plate of second-hand, dilapidated beef-, 
steaks or veal cutlets, then a dish of fried potatoes, or 
beans, or cabbage. Back on the shelves are bushels 
of bread, in pieces, generally very stale and dry; and 
in some of the stalls the '' sweet tooth " of the custom- 
ers may be gratified by the purchase of old cakes, 
tarts, little pats of dirty -looking Uanc-mange^ and oth- 
er delicacies fallen from their high estate. This Grol- 
gotha of departed good things is visited every day by 
poor people, who, for a few sous, purchase suflicient 
to keep soul and body together, and who either eat 
on the spot, or tumbling the purchase into a greasy 
bag, take it to their homes, to share it with those who 
are dependent on them. 




CHAPTEE VII. 

THE HOSPITALS OF PARIS. 

Hospital Lariboisiere. — The Physician's Visit. — The surgical WardSc 
— The Operating-room. — Medical Students. — Chassaignac's Oper- 
ations with the " Ecraseur." 

"l^rO city in the world is so well provided as Paris 
■^^ with public hospitals — those noble institutions 
in which are received, " without money and without 
price," the sick of every nation, age, clime^ color, and 
religion. Every description of disease, every special 
want, and every period of life, from infancy to old age, 
have here establishments devoted to them. One is 
appropriated to poor women about becoming mothers ; 
another, the foundling hospital, to the reception and 
care of abandoned infants ; another exists, in which 
children only are received from the public institutions, 
or when brought thither by their parents. Two hos- 
pitals are expressly set apart for aged people, and two 
are devoted to the care and comfort of incurable pa- 
tients of both sexes. In one establishment, the Hos- 
pice des Menages, old married couples may live, and 
terminate their career together. Others have been 
arranged for the care of persons who, without being 



THE HOSPITALS OF PARIS. 169 

utterly destitute, do not possess sufficient means to 
enable them to live independently, and who, giving 
their incomes to the institutions, are provided for dur- 
ing their lives. Numbers of old army officers with 
small pensions live in this manner, and many mem- 
bers of families once proud and rich, but who in the 
revolutions that have successively swept over France 
have been well-nigh ruined, avail themselves now of 
this charitable provision. 

Besides these establishments devoted to special 
purposes, there are in Paris eight general hospitals, 
intended for the reception of persons of both sexes 
attacked with acute diseases, and for those who have 
been maimed, or who require the performance of sur- 
gical operations. The only necessary passport of ad- 
mission is the fact of being sick, or of requiring sur- 
gical treatment. Foreigners, however, must have re- 
sided six months in Paris to entitle them io free admis- 
sion. A gratuitous consultation is held every morning 
at each hospital, at which patients may present them- 
selves, or they may be sent to any particular establish- 
ment upon application to the Bureau Centrale. These 
hospitals contain, each, from three to eight hundred 
beds, and the number of patients annually received 
amounts to nearly ninety thousand, about six thou- 
sand being always in occupancy of the beds. Twelve 
thousand aged people are provided for in them. 



170 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

About five thousand foundlings are annually commit- 
ted to the fostering care of the good Sisters of St. Yin- 
cent de Paul, which order was expressly established 
by its benevolent founder for the shelter of these poor 
little outcasts ; these waifs thrown homeless upon the 
bleak shore of life's stormy ocean. The most cele- 
brated surgeons and physicians of Paris, such as 
Messrs. Nelaton, Yelpeau, and Chassaignac, pay daily 
visits to the patients in the different hospitals and 
prescribe for them. 

The annual cost of caring for "the sick in the Paris- 
ian hospitals is about twenty-two millions of francs, 
derived from the following sources: Eevenues from 
property bequeathed to the fund ; receipts from thea- 
tres and other places of public amusement (ten per 
cent, of the gross receipts) ; receipts from paying pa- 
tients, and a subvention from the city of twelve mil- 
lions of francs. The average daily cost of maintenance 
of each patient in the general hospitals is two francs 
and twenty-five centimes. In the hospice for old peo- 
ple it is but one franc and a half. 

The Hospital Larihoi sieve, which is the newest 
and finest establishment of the kind in Paris, was a 
frequent place of resort of mine in company with 
some one of my medical acquaintances; and as the 
routine and management of all the general hospitals 
is the same, a description of this will answer for all. 



THE HOSPITALS OF PAKIS. 171 

It contains six hundred and twelve beds, divided into 
twenty different wards. At eight o'clock each morn- 
ing, the visit of the physician, who usually has two 
wards, including about eighty patients, under his 
charge, is made. The first thing which strikes the 
visitor, upon entering one of the wards, is the air of 
exceeding cleanliness and neatness which pervades 
the whole. The floors are of wood, polished with 
wax ; the beds are ranged along on either side, leav- 
ing a broad walk between them. Each bed is hung 
with a canopy of white sheeting, and at the foot of it 
is a card stating the name and residence, disease and 
time of admission of the patient. In each ward, hov- 
ering around the bedside of the sick like angels of 
mercy, are several sisters of the orders of St. Vincent, 
St. Martha, St. Augustine, or some other of the re- 
ligious orders which the Catholic Church has insti- 
tuted as a retreat for those who, tired of the follies 
and frivolities of the world, desire to spend their lives 
in offices of charity and goodness. These women de- 
vote themselves to the care of the sick, performing 
often the most menial services, cheering the con- 
valescent with the radiance of their heavenly faces, 
and pointing the poor sufferers, when the visions of 
this world are fading into eternity, to the cross of 
the Saviour, and the life beyond the hospital and the 
grave. One sees these angels of mercy in every street 



172 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

in Paris, bent upon some charitable errand, and big- 
oted indeed must he be whose religious prejudices 
would prevent his heart from doing homage to these 
noble and self-sacrificing women. Theirs is no life 
of indolent worship; no mere muttering of paters 
and aves^ and counting of beads upon a rosary, consti- 
tutes their labor, but their time is spent in an active, 
^ceaseless round of charitable toil. With tender cares, 
such as a woman only knows how to apply, these 
"sisters" minister wherever suffering demands their 
aid. Childless, and ever to be so, they are the moth- 
ers of the orphans and foundlings whose parents are 
dead, or have deserted them, and their unmated hearts 
embrace within their large folds all who need their 
aid or sympathy, regardless of clime, creed, or color. 

It is a great mistalve to suppose that it is only the 
old, ugly, and soured women who take the vow of 
chastity, poverty, and obedience, and whose lives, un- 
der the instruction and control of the Church, are 
spent in deeds of active benevolence. Beautiful faces 
oftener peep out from the white or black hoods of the 
"sisters;" and forms which would excitp the liveliest 
admiration in the salons of fashion, are seen bending 
over the bedsides of the sick and dying, administer- 
ing comfort and consolation. If there are, indeed, in 
heaven "many mansions," these noble and devoted 
women certainly earn a claim to one of the grandest 



THE HOSPITALS OF PARIS. ' 178 

and most beautiful ; or will they there, as here, be 
" ministering angels," amply recompensed by being 
servants of the Lord, and — doing good? 

The physician, followed by a crowd of medical stu- 
dents who attend the hospital every morning, goes to 
the bedside of each patient, asks a few questions, 
makes a physical examination if necessary, and if 
in a good humor, utters a word of . encouragement 
and prescribes the treatment for the ensuing twenty- 
four-hours, which is noted down by an assistant in 
a book kept for the purpose. The wards for females 
are precisely similar in arrangement to those of the 
males. I recollect, in my first visit, I noticed some" 
very prettj^, pale faces peering out from the neat„ 
white caps which the patients wore. Many of them 
were suffering from typhoid fever, the scourge of 
Paris, and one poor little girl of some seventeen 
summers, at whose bedside even the old physician 
seemed inclined to linger longer than usual, was evi- 
dently fast fading away with consumption. The doc- 
tor kindly called her mafille^ and told her to be cour- 
ageous, and her dimming eye lighted up for a moment 
as though she was determined to try ; but, as we left 
her bedside, she had settled back into the listless, 
careless state in which we found hei\ Poor child ! 
I saw by the card at the foot of her bed that she was 
a lingere^ and she had probably for the past three or 



174 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

four years been stitching her life away in some damp 
and sunless garret till she could work no longer. I 
hope she had some friends to claim her poor remains 
after she had passed "through that gate of evergreens 
which men call death ;" for if not, her poor little body 
would have to be submitted to the dissecting-knife of 
the student, and her delicate limbs hacked to pieces, 
and afterward .mingled promiscuously with dozens 
of others, thrown into the huge ditch where the un- 
known poor, who die in the hospitals of Paris, are 
tumbled like dead dogs. 

From the sick ward we pass into the surgical 
wards, which are under the care of the celebrated 
Chassaignac, a little, stout, good-humored looking 
man, wearing a white apron, and having much of the 
air and general appearance of a jolly butcher, par- 
ticularly as his apron, whenever I saw him, was cov- 
ered with blood, the effect of wiping his fingers on 
it after feeling of and operating upon wounds. In 
these wards are all sorts of cases requiring surgical 
treatment. Each patient is examined, and his case 
described to the students, who gather around the bed- 
side as soon as the surgeon stops.^ I observed that 
he passed one bed one morning without halting, 
and looking through the curtains, I saw a head re- 
sembling more a huge cauliflower than any thing 
human — the eyes completely closed, and the whole 



THE HOSPITALS OF PARIS. 175 

face a scab. " What is tlie matter with that man ?" 
I asked of a medical friend with whom I had come 
to the hospital. "Small -pox," he laconically re- 
plied. I felt very mnch like running ; but having 
determined to go through the entire routine that 
morning, I simply hurried to the end of the ward 
nearest the door, where I could get a breath of fresh 
air from the court-yard. 

In Paris, and indeed throughout France, there are 
no special hospitals for small-pox patients, and the gen- 
eral hospitals are often crowded with them. The phy- 
sicians say that their chances of recovery are greatly 
increased by their being scattered among the general 
wards, instead of confining them together. This is 
undoubtedly true ; but I should suppose that the 
risks to which the other patients are exposed on this 
account would quite balance the advantage, as it is 
not unfrequent that cases occur of patients catching 
the disease in the hospitals and dying. The French 
Government encourage vaccination in every possible 
manner, and in each arrondissement of Paris are bu- 
reaus where persons may not only be vaccinated gra- 
tuitously, but where parents are actually paid the 
sum of three francs each for submitting their chil- 
dren to the operation. Besides this, no child can be 
admitted into the public schools of Paris without, the 
presentation of a certificate of vaccination. 



176 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

The cliniques are held every Monday morning 
in the amphitheatre, the surgeon keeping through 
the week such cases as do not require immediate 
treatment, for the purpose of performing the necessa- 
ry operations in the presence of the crowd of stu- 
dents who flock to the hospitals to witness them. 
The operating-room is a little, badly -ventilated am- 
phitheatre, capable of holding about two hundred 
persons, and adjoining one of the surgical wards of 
the hospital. The seats are raised, and upon themj 
on the occasion of my last visit, I found, some sitting, 
and others standing, a considerable number of medi- 
cal students. These are generally young men, gath- 
ered from all parts of the world, who have come to 
Paris to avail themselves of the facilities such as no 
other city affords for the study of medical science. 
Some are rich, and more are poor ; some well- 
dressed, but a greater proportion wearing coats whose 
texture is plainly distinguishable, and sleepy -looking, 
napless hats. They are a very free-and-easy looking 
set, and are standing on the benches, with their hats 
on, some smoking pipes and cigarettes, which are ex- 
tinguished upon the entrance of Chassaignac. At 
the foot of the amphitheatre is a low railing, inside 
of which is a table covered with a sheet ; on the win- 
dow back of it are several boxes filled with knives, 
and saws, and hooks, and a quantity of horrible-look- 



THE HOSPITALS OF PARIS. 177 

ing instruments, used only in the surgeon's art. Two 
or three basins containing sponges, a basket of lint, 
several pails of water, and a quantity of bottles and 
towels complete the paraphernalia, and the surgeon 
and half a dozen assistants, all wearing white aprons 
besmeared with blood, are standing around, as if im- 
patiently waiting for a victim. The entire scene, in- 
deed, was not a little calaulated to remind one of the 
stories and pictures of scenes in the history of the 
Spanish Inquisition. 

The victim soon arrived ; he was brought in on a 
stretcher, and wore nothing but his shirt. He was 
placed by the assistants npon the table, one taking 
hold of each foot, one standing at either side, while 
another, pouring some chloroform from a bottle upon 
a sponge, held it within an inch of his nostrils. Imme- 
diately the man began to groan, and pant, and breathe 
with difiiculty, the muscles of his legs contracted vio- 
lently, and he appeared to be in terrible agony. His 
teeth grated against each other, and his moans were 
sorrowful to hear. In order more to concentrate the 
vapor, a towel was placed over his face, and the sponge 
containing the chloroform held beneath it ; then he be- 
gan to sob and cry, " No, no, don't, please ; do let me 
alone !" Soon, however, he grew more quiet, and in 
five minutes from the time he was brought in was 
sound asleep. The operation was for cancer of the 



178 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

rectum, and was commenced by the insertion of a 
curved irocari. Chassaignac, like most great men, 
has a hobby ; he is the inventor of a surgical in- 
strument called the ecraseur^ with which he replaces 
the knife in many operations. In this instrument, a 
steel chain, composed of small and not particularly 
sharp links, is used to perform the cutting, or rather 
tearing of the flesh, the advantage over the knife be- 
ing that the hemorrhage is much less. The opera- 
tion is considerably longer, however, as the. chain is 
wound up very slowly. After inserting the trocart^ 
the chain was run through and re-fastened, and the 
surgeon commenced slowly screwing it up, making 
an irritating noise like that produced by winding up 
a clock. The patient lay perfectly still, although oc- 
casionally uttering a low and plaintive moan. While 
winding up the chain, the surgeon* explained the op- 
eration to the students, who were all eagerly bend- 
ing forward to watch every movement. The blood 
was pouring out rather freely, and a non-professional 
friend who was with me, touching me on the shoul- 
der, suggested that " it was very warm." I turned, 
and saw that his face was ashy pale ; but before I 
could speak to him he made a spring for the door, 
and I saw no more of him till an hour afterward at 
breakfast, where he was consoling his stomach with a 
rognon saute and an omelette aux fines herbes. The sur- 



THE HOSPITALS OF PARIS. 179 

geon, before he completed the operation, which is con- 
sidered a bold and dangerous one, informed the class 
that it afforded the only hope of life to • the patient ; 
that it had often succeeded, and oftener still had 
failed ; but that the fact of occasional success, coupled 
with the certainty of death without it, was a suffi- 
cient warrant for its performance ; and with this he 
exhibited an enormous cancerous tumor, which had 
been separated from the flesh by the ecraseur^ and the 
patient, still sleeping soundly under the blessed influ- 
ence of chloroform, was taken back to the surgical 
ward. 

A poor woman with a cancer of the foot, and look- 
ing neat and clean, with a white cap and chemise, and 
a brown woollen skirt on, was next brought in. She 
was laid on her back on the operating-table, and while 
the assistants were administering chloroform to her, 
M. Chassaignac amused himself with a minor opera- 
tion, the removal of an enlarged tonsil from a young 
man's throat. He did it very skillfully ; but a person 
inclined to be fastidious might have insisted that he 
should give his fi.ngers a wipe, as they had just been 
handling the tumor from the cancerous patient, and 
were covered with blood. However, as all these op- 
erations are performed gratuitously, the young man 
probably thought it would not be proper to exhibit 
any undue degree of sensitiveness. 



180 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

By this time the woman was sound asleep, and the 
surgeon commenced what is technically known as 
Lisfranc's operation for the amputation of the foot, 
and which consists in cutting off the entire fore part 
of the foot, including all the toes, up to near the 
instep. The knife was inserted, and handled and 
turned witli the same delicacy and skill with which 
an expert carver would dodge the joints in a turkey, 
and in less than a minute the operation was comple- 
ted, the bottom skin of the foot being left as a flap, 
to cover over the torn and bleeding flesh. The pa- 
tient had not moved during the operation ; but when 
her foot was bound up, and she was being placed 
upon the stretcher to be carried away, she awoke and 
commenced imploring the surgeon not to perform the 
operation, so utterly unconscious was she that it had 
already been completed. This was the last of the op- 
erations for the day, and the poor and seedy students 
started for some cremerie^ or cheap restaurant, to get a 
ten-sous breakfast, while the favored of fortune wend- 
ed their way to more expensive establishments. 




CHAPTER VIII. 

THE CLOSERIE DE LILAS. 

Students and Etudiantes. — " Grisettes " of the Past and Present. — 
The Society at the " Closerie." — The male and female Dancers. — 
Remarkable Terpsichorean Gymnastics. — The Cancan. — Order and 
Propriety. 

^r^HE Closerie de Lilas^ as it is called in the sum- 
-■- mer, and the Prado^ as known in the winter, is a 
garden situated on the Boulevard St. Michel, at the end 
of the garden of the Luxembourg. In the summer, 
as at the more aristocratic balls of the Mahille, the 
dancing at the Closerie is in the open air, while in win- 
ter a portion of the garden is inclosed and made com- 
fortable. Here balls are given four nights in the 
week through the whole year, and this is the favorite 
resort of the students of the Latin Quarter, accom- 
panied by their young female friends, to whom the 
name of etudiantes has been facetiously applied. 
These girls belong to a class which is rapidly becom- 
ing extinct — \h.Q grisette — or rather they did belong to 
it when it existed-; for now it can scarcely be said to 
exist at all as a class, even on the left bank of the 
Seine and in the Quartier Latin, which twenty years 
ago was crowded with its representatives. A few 



182 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

types of the grisette remain, considerably fossilized, 
wearing the saucy cap and gray woollen or cotton 
dress and white apron, and may occasionally be seen 
flitting, like shadows of the past, through the crowds 
which at all hours of the day are crossing the Pont 
Neuf^ or wending their way homeward from their dai- 
ly labors, along the narrow sidewalks of the Kue de 
Seine. But the luxurious tendencies of the present 
age, the " fastness" of modern times, and the increase 
of wealth, have destroyed the peculiarities of the gri- 
sette race ; and now, instead of being, as formerly, con- 
tented and happy, and certainly much neater look- 
ing in their white caps and aprons, and gray gowns, 
they must flaunt in silks, and muslins, and bonnets 
decorated with artificial vegetables, fruits, and flow- 
ers. Their morals have not improved either, with 
their change of dress. At the period referred to, 
these girls usually formed alliances with the students 
of the Quariier^ but continued at their work, and were 
satisfied with the occasional present of a new cotton 
robe, and the treat of a dinner outside the Barrihe 
on Sundays. Poverty and constancy were said to go 
hand in hand in those days; but all is changed. 
Some of these girls still continue their labors as book- 
folders and stitchers, dressmakers and tailoresses, but 
they have ceased to be contented with their lot, their 
labor, their gray gowns and faithful lovers, as former- 



THE CLOSERIE DE LILAS. 183 

Ij, and, it is said, have become mercenary, discontent- 
ed, and unfaithful. Even now, however, the young 
females who visit the Oloserie de Lilas enjoy the repu- 
tation of possessing a greater amount of virtue — ac- 
cording to their standard of " virtue," which consists 
in having but one amant at a time — than the frequent- 
ers of any other public ball in Paris. 

The Closerie de Lilas on a pleasant summer evening 
presents a sight well worth witnessing — once at least. 
It is not exactly the locality to which a young man 
just commencing life could be conscientiously recom- 
mended to go for the benefit either of his physical or 
moral health, but it is one, I am sorry to say, which 
most young men who come to Paris find among 
the first. It is certainly a funny place. There are 
in the Latin Quartei»f^ome three or four thousand stu- 
dents of medicine, law, and art, many of whom do 
not cross the bridges once a month, and whose even- 
ing's amusement is found at the Closerie. The price 
of admittance is one franc, and "ladies free;" and as 
the balls commence at eight, and continue till eleven 
o'clock, it certainly can not be considered high. A 
" full dress" is not required to gain admittance to this 
ball, nor is it necessary, when dancing, to remove the 
hat from the head or the pipe from the mouth. About 
ten o'clock the floor is generally thronged, and the 
orchestra scarcely discernible through the thick cloud 



184 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

of tobacco-smoke. Young men who have been por- 
ing all day over the musty tomes of medicine or 
law, or engaged in the cheerful operation of cutting 
up dead bodies, crowd into the Gloserie at night for 
recreation. 

A quadrille at the Closerie de Lilas no more re- 
sembles a quadrille in the " best society," than does 
the wild dance of the Polynesian the grave and for- 
mal menuet de la cour. 

These balls are in fact indescribable, and " must be 
seen to be appreciated." Although the figures are 
the same as in ordinary quadrilles, the great deside- 
ratum appears to be to make the dancing as grotesque 
as possible. The men dance on their heels, and double 
themselves up into a shape resembling a bull-frog, 
swing their arms about like sails-in a rude wind, kick 
up their feet in the most surprising manner, and 
occasionally turn a somersault from one side of the 
space allotted for the quadrille to the other, alighting 
in their proper places in perfect time with the music, 
and, seizing their partners by the waist, continue the 
gahpade as though nothing had happened. What 
adds greatly to the singularity of the scene is the im- 
perturbable gravity maintained by the prominent act- 
ors in it ; not a smile escaping them while executing 
the most ridiculous manoeuvres in the wild cancan. 

But the movements of the women in this exciting, 



THE CLOSERIE DE LILAS. 185 

free-and-easy dance, eclipse any thing of the kind any- 
where else in the world. Many of those who visit 
the Gloserie are celebrated for their peculiar style of 
dancing; and around these crowds of visitors always 
gather when they are preparing for a quadrille. 
With the exception of an eas}^, careless swinging of 
the body, which contrasts strikingly with the ^tiff 
and formal manner in which the quadrille is walked 
through in fashionable society, and an occasional ex- 
hibition of hosiery which would be considered highly 
improper in the higher circles, nothing particularly 
objectionable or peculiar is done during the first por- 
tion of the dance. As they become warmed by the 
exercise and excited by the music, what remnants of 
modesty and reserve still cling to them by reason of 
their womanhood are thrown off, and the danseuse^ 
particularly if she be a celebrity, and has an admiring 
crowd about her, prepares herself for an exhibition of 
her peculiar talents. With her arms she gathers up 
in front the ample folds of her skirts in such a man- 
ner and to such a degree as to prove beyond the shad- 
ow of a doubt, to the student in natural history, that 
woman as well as man is a bifurcated animal. Ee- 
leased then from the thraldom of her skirts, she starts 
across the space, kicking alternately with one and the 
other of the lower limbs as high as her head, and in 
time with the music, occasionally amusing herself by 



186 AN AMEKICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

removing with the end of her foot the hat from the 
head of her vis-d-vis, or knocking in the same manner 
the. pipe from his mouth. When the quadrille is fin- 
ished she goes into one of the alcoves, and refreshes 
herself with beer and cigarettes. 

The utmost "order and propriety " are maintained 
at these balls ; several policemen being present, who. 
occasionally, when the saltatory movements of the 
young ladies become too marked, tap them upon the 
shoulder, and remind them that " the decencies of life 
must be observed." Quarrels rarely occur ; and these 
saturnalia usually pass off with the utmost good-hu- 
mor and gayety. 




CHAPTEK IX. 

THE FOUNDLING HOSPITAL OF PARIS. 

How Foundlings are taken in and done for. — Visit to the Hospital. — 
The new-born Babies. — The Infirmaries. — How the Foundhngs 
are cared for. — How they become Foundlings — Their Mothers. — 
A grave moral and social Question. — Legitimate and illegitimate 
Births in Paris. 

A MONGr the benevolent institutions of Paris, one 
■^-^ of tlie most interesting to the stranger is the 
Foundling Hospital, where children abandoned vol- 
untarily by their mothers are cared for during their 
infancy — the administration retaining charge of them 
until they are twenty-one years of age, the males be- 
ing apprenticed to trades, or placed with farmers, and 
the girls either married, or situations as domestics pro- 
cured for them. Formerly a revolving box, called a 
toil?", placed in a niche in the wall on the street, was 
the medium by which the abandoned child was in- 
troduced to its new home, and the tender care of the 
excellent Sisters of St. Yincent de Paul — the benev- 
olent founder of which order, in the year 1640, es- 
tablished this hospital. At present it is necessary, 
before a child can be received into the institution, 
that a certificate, signed by the Commissary of Po- 



188 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

lice of the quartier in which the mother lives, shall be 
presented, and her name and address taken. Every 
effort is made to induce the mother to retain the 
child, in which event assistance is rendered her from 
the hospital fund. If, however, she persists in its 
abandonment, it is received and carried into a room 
called the crhche^ where it is placed before the fire on 
a bench. A ticket bearing its number, made out in 
the order in which it arrives — No. 1 commencing 
with the first child brought in at the beginning 
of each year — is then attached to its clothing. The 
child is now washed and nursed by a number of stout, 
healthy-looking women, placed in one of the infirm- 
aries if sick, and if a healthy child, retained in the 
creche until it is sent, as all the children are as soon as 
possible, into the country to nurse. 

The last visit I made to the hospital was in the lat- 
ter part of December, and there were then nine little 
lumps of humanity lying swaddled up in their cloth- 
ing upon the bench in front of a good fire, looking 
like a row of onions on strings. These had all been 
brought in during the day, and most of them had first 
opened their eyes to the daylight, and drawn their 
first breath of God's fresh air, and had their first won- 
der as to " what it was all about," either on that day 
or the previous one. The last child which had come 
in was ticketed ISTo. 4897, and the yearly average 



THE FOUNDLING HOSPITAL OF PARIS. 189 

of infants thus abandoned is a little more than five 
thousand. The sighfwas not one calculated to incline 
a bachelor to matrimony, for they are not handsome, 
these little one-day-old wayfarers, who already look 
wearied and worn before they have fairly commenced 
the journey of ]ife. Poor little fatherless— more than 
motherless — orphans. May the good Grod, who cares 
for the sparrow, bear up their little wings through all 
their flight to a home where they shall find a loving 
Father. 

There were about a hundred children in the room, 
most of them but a few days old, sleeping in neat lit- 
tle cribs, covered with clean white curtains. These 
were only waiting for nurses to come and take them 
to the country. The administration has organized 
a perfect system for the care and nursing of the 
children which are sent away. The whole of France 
is apportioned for this purpose into districts, in each 
one of which a director is appointed, whose duty it is 
to visit, at least once a year, every child placed out to 
nurse or be cared for in his department, and at the 
same time to procure nurses for the constantly-arriv- 
ing children. These women, who are usually the 
wives of peasants, and what would be considered in 
France ^' well-to-do " people, who keep a cow and a 
pig, and hire and till a few acres of land, and to whom 
the additional care of a little child is no great burden, 



190 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

come to Paris, remain a few days at the hospital, and 
then each one, with her charge*, returns home again. 
They receive from eight to thirteen francs a month 
each from the administration for their services. 

Over the door which gives entrance to the creche 
is the appropriate sentence, '''' Mon plre et ma mere 
Wbont abandone^ m^aisle Seigneur a pris soin de moV — 
" My father and my mother have forsaken me, but 
the Lord has cared for me." Passing beneath this, we 
visited the infirmaries, of which there are four— one for 
medical, one for surgical, one for ophthalmic cases, 
and one for measles — and in all these the cradles were 
well filled with little sufferers, some of whom were 
rapidly and painfully breathing away their young 
lives. Thence we visited the school-rooms, where the 
children are taught by some intelligent and cheerful- 
looking Sisters of St. Vincent, and the play-rooms, 
where, also under the charge of the good sisters, they 
amuse themselves. Everywhere, as in all the public 
institutions of France, every thing was neat and clean, 
and all cold speculation as to the propriety and effect 
upon public morals of such institutions as these must 
give way, in the mind of the visitor, to a feeling of 
thankfulness that there is so comfortable a place where 
these poor little outcasts are so well sheltered. 

Most of the children are sent to the country before 
they are two years of age, and at twelve the boys are 



THE FOUNDLINa HOSPITAL OF PARIS. 191 

usually bound apprentices to trades, while the girls 
frequently remain in the families of their nurses, by 
whom they are often adopted, or are furnished places 
as domestics. When they marry, provided their con- 
duct has been unexceptionable, they receive from the 
administration each a marriage portion of one hun- 
dred and forty-eight francs. As the administration 
retains the general control of the foundlings until 
they are of age, they have a large number continu- 
ally on their hands ; and the director informed me at 
the time of my last visit that there were then no less 
than forty -five thousand under age, over whom the ad- 
ministration kept its fatherly eye. Only about one in 
a hundred are ever reclaimed, although the mother, 
by giving proof of character and ability to support it, 
can at any time before it becomes of age obtain pos- 
session of her child. 

As a matter of course, the large majority of chil- 
dren in the foundling hospital are illegitimate, al- 
though instances of children born in wedlock and 
abandoned by their parents on account of poverty 
occasionally occur. Most of the children are the off- 
spring of sewing-girls, shop-girls, domestics, artificial- 
flower makers, and workers at the thousand-and-one 
trades which are plied in Paris. It is almost ask- 
ing too much of human nature, under such circum- 
stances, to expect these girls to be strictly " virtuous.'' 



192 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

The wages of a couturier e^ a girl who works on ladies' 
dresses, seldom exceeds twelve francs a week, for 
twelve hours' labor a day, and the general rate of pay 
for sewing-girls is from ten to fifteen francs a week. 
On this a young girl can manage, by rigid economy, 
to keep body and soul together by living in some 
dreary, little, sunless garret, and eating a two-sou roll 
and drinking a cup of coffee for breakfast, and mak- 
ing a dinner from a bowl of soup and a dish of boiled 
meat at a cheap cook-shop. But every thing, eatable, 
drinkable, and wearable, is very expensive in Paris 
now, and working-women can not save enough out of 
their small pay to meet the needful demands for the 
simplest styles of dress ; and the working-classes of 
Paris dress with simplicity, but in excellent taste, and 
it is marvellous how nicely they manage the com- 
monest materials. 

Possibly many, certainly most, of the mothers 
of the children in the foundling hospital, arrive in 
Paris from their country homes in search of work, 
intending to be virtuous. Could the story of their 
struggles through want, grim hunger, and cheerless 
cold be truthfully portrayed, the most rigid moralist 
might find palliation for their errors. But it is with 
the result, not the causes, of these lapses from virtue 
that we have to do at present. 

It is evident that moral tracts, with gifts of flannel 



THE FOUNDLING HOSPITAL OF PASIS. 193 

and other small necessaries, even if supplied in suffi- 
cient quantities, will not meet the requirements of 
any appreciable number of mothers who have no 
claim, sanctioned alike by law and religion, on the 
fathers of their offspring ; it is simply a question of 
insufaciency of the bare necessaries of life to support 
a family that leads to many cases of infanticide. It is 
not so much any shame or disgrace attaching to the 
birth of children under such circumstances that hur- 
ries mothers into the fearful crime of child-murder, 
but the grim horror of a lingering deatb by starv- 
ation staring them in the face. But the concealment 
of the birth by infanticide is undoubtedly a motive 
to the crime in many instances. In fact it has been 
found in France that, since the suppression of the 
tours^ or turning-boxes, by means of which the aban- 
donment of the child was rendered much easier than 
it is at present, the crime of infanticide has greatly 
increased in the departments where the boxes have 
been removed, the average annual number of cases 
having risen from 104 to 196. The question of re- 
storing the tour in the Paris hospital, and in the oth- 
ers where it has been abolished, is seriously discussed, 
and public opinion throughout France is decidedly 
in favor of it. The number of foundling hospitals in 
France is one hundred and fifty-two. 

By the law of France, an illegitimate child can be 
9 



194 AN" AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

legitimatized by the simple acknowledgment of the 
father, made, of course, in due legal form. This is 
indeed frequently done. The statistics of the year 
1864 (the latest which have been published) exhibit 
the following facts : 

The population of Paris is 1,696,000 ; the births 
amounted to 53,863 ; of these, 38,997 were legitimate, 
14,866 illegitimate; and, of the latter, 3600 were 
" recognized " by their fathers. 




CHAPTER X. 

A CHAMBER OF HOREORS. 

The Dissecting rooms at Clamart— The "i-'alle de Reception."— The 
" Subjects." — Food for Meditation. 

^^TTTILL you make a day of horrors of it?" asked 
^ ' my medical friend as we were sitting vis-d-vis 
over a filet aux champignons and a steaming cup of 
rich coffee; " will you make a day of horrors of it, and 
come with me to the dissecting-rooms, where you will 
see about a hundred ' subjects ?' " " I'll see about it," 
I answered, "and in the mean time let us drop the 
'subject ' until we have discussed this breakfast." So 
we conversed upon more cheerful topics until we had 
finished, when I concluded that, having commenced, 
I would make "a day of horrors" of it, and we start- 
ed for Clamart, the principal dissecting-place of Paris. 
The building, which was formerly a hospital, is appro- 
priately located upon the site of an ancient burial- 
ground, and the entrance to it is laid out in the form 
of a garden. Passing through this, we entered one 
of the wards, and my eye suddenly fell upon a scene 
the remembrance of which might well haunt a man 
in his dying hour ! 

The ward was about fifty feet in length, by twenty 



196 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

ill width, and, upon either side, were twelve zinc dis- 
secting-tables, on each of which lay a dead human 
body, or such portion of it as the knife of the student 
had left. They were lying in all positions, and were 
in different stages of decay. Here was what had been 
an aged, gray-haired woman, stretched on her back, 
her arms crossed upon her shrivelled breast, and her 
sightless eyes wide open and staring ! On the adjoin- 
ing table were a head and trunk, and next to it was a 
pair of legs, with the muscles laid bare, and the flesh 
green with rapidly increasing mortification. A poor 
little boy's body, with the skull sawed open and the 
brain bared, lay upon one of the tables; and on an- 
other seven or eight cadavres^ divided into parts, were 
piled up, or rather tumbled together pi^omiscuously, 
like so many dead rats in a gutter. In one body the 
abdomen was laid open and the abdominal viscera 
were exposed to view, while in another the flesh upon 
one side of the face was taken off, and the facial mus- 
cles and nerves exhibited. Some were so mutilated 
that scarcely a vestige of humanity could be recog- 
nized in their hacked limbs and ghastly faces. A 
sickly, charnel-like smell pervaded the room, not im- 
proved by the odor of tobacco, which most of the stu- 
dents engaged in dissecting were smoking from very 
ancient pipes. At the tables, patiently bending over 
the bodies, or parts of bodies, before them, sat the stu- 



THE DISSECTING-ROOMS AT CLAMART. 197 

dents— generally young men— with their knives in 
their hands, tracing up nerves, muscles, and arteries, 
or carefully examining the location of the different 
organs. Upon entering the wards, they change their 
coats for blue blouses and white aprons, and each one 
keeps constantly by his side a little piece of nitrate 
of silver, with which to immediately cauterize any cut 
which he might accidentally give himself; as these 
are always poisonous, and often very dangerous. 
Ranged along the middle of the aisle were a number 
of tubs for the reception of the pieces cut off. 

The students usually " work " on a subject five or 
six days without submitting it to any preparation; 
but those wishing to make long and patient dissec- 
tions inject the arteries and veins with a solution of 
chloride of sodium, which preserves the bodies for a 
long time without decay. There are four of these 
rooms, all presenting the same general features ; and 
after passing through them, we entered what the stu- 
dents facetiously call the '' Salle de Reception," where 
the bodies are received each day, and where all as- 
semble at two o'clock for the purpose of making a 
choice of " subjects." Here was, if possible, a more 
revolting sight than the other. Thirty or forty na- 
ked dead bodies, males and females, old and young, 
were laid indiscriminately side by side like logs of 
wood, and elbowing each other; and as many students 



198 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

weie examining them, and noisily discussing their 
merits and disputing their choice. One among them 
was what remained of a beautiful young girl — beauti- 
ful still in death — and, in this horrid companionship, 
clean-limbed and fresh-looking, with a fine brown, full 
face, and large black eyes, wide open and staring on 
vacancy. She could not have been more than seven- 
teen or eighteen years of age, and could not have 
died of any prolonged disease, for she looked as 
though it needed but a breath to make that finely - 
developed bosom heave with the impulses of life 
again. She fell to the lot of my medical friend, and 
three days afterward he told me he had cut her all to 
pieces. 

Poor, poor Humanity ! These stiff, stark, and star- 
ing bodies, and those other mutilated forms on the 
tables, but a few days since were the tenant-houses of 
human souls, and obeyed the direction of human will, 
and moved in obedience to hope and aspiration ; and 
now here they are, waiting to be mangled for the 
benefit of science. What food here for the moralist, 
as well as the medical student! Poor, poor Humanity ! 
Is this all that remains of it ? So I could not help so- 
liloquizing ; and then that beautiful verse of Horace 
Smith, the closing one of his " Address to the Egyp- 
tian Mummy," which I had not thought of since my 
school-days, involuntarily came to me: 



THE DISSECTING-KOOMS AT CLAMART. 199 

"Why should this worthless tegument endure, 
If its undying guest be lost forever ? 
Oh, let us keep the soul embalmed and pure 
In living virtues, that when both shall sever, 
Although corruption shall the frame consume, 
The immortal spirit in the skies may bloom !" 

The "subjects" in the dissecting-rooms are fur- 
nished principally from the hospitals. Patients who 
die there are kept twenty-four hours, and if not claim- 
ed in that time by some friend or relative, are mark- 
ed for the dissecting-rooms. About four thousand 
bodies are thus annually appropriated, the remains of 
which, after the student has completed his investiga- 
tions, are deposited in a corner specially appropriated 
to the purpose in the cemetery of Mont Parnasse. 




-f^^ 



CHAPTEE XL 

THE " SPECIALITE DE PUMPKIN PIE." 
A Mystery to the uninitiated. — " Thin Magpie " an American Dish. 

XT is said that men who have been held as prison 
■^ ers among savages have forgotten, in the course 
of time, their mother-tongue. Human nature is so 
weak that, under certain trying circumstances and 
temptations, religion and country have been denied. 
A mother may forget the babe she nourished ; the 
din and bustle in the noisy highways of life may 
drown in the memory of the full-grown man the bab- 
bling music of the brook which flowed, in his boy- 
hood, by the school-house on the woody hillside. All 
these may be, and more ; but there are two things in 
this changing world which, once loved, can never be 
detested while life lasts — a taste of. which, once ac- 
quired, even though in earliest youth, nothing can 
destroy or vitiate, but which remains ever strong and 
fresh to the last. These two symbols of constancy 
and undying faith are Buckwheat Cakes and Pump- 
kin Pie. 

There is a queer little place in one of the quiet 



THE "SPECIAUTE DE PUMPKIN PIE." 201 

streets in the vicinity of the Madeleine, which has 
become a shrine to which few Americans coming to 
Paris fail to make a pilgrimage, and, having once 
crossed the threshold, there is a charm about the in- 
terior and its contents which irresistibly attracts them 
often back to it during their sojourn. This is the es- 
tablishment of Madame Busque, and here is her card, 
a curiosity in its way which would very seriously puz- 
zle a foreigner other than one of English extraction. 



AUX AMERICAINS, 

SPECIALITE DE PUMPKIN PIE. 

MME. BUSQUE 

40 RUE GODOT-DE-MAUROI, 40 

Pres la Madeleine, 

PAEIS. • 



Over the door is the American coat -of- arms, the 
eagle and the arrows ; and if thie sight of the emblem 
of his country fails to send the blood coursing quick- 
er through the veins of the American who sees it, 
the window is filled with articles the first glance at 
which will certainly have this effect. These are 
pumpkin and mince and apple pies, and gingerbread 
and doughnuts, . all looking particularly nice and 
tempting. On the glass-door was originally painted, 
with an apparent consciousness of its literal truth, 
those cabalistic words, " English spoken ;" but the 
Madame, who is not very "strong" in her English, 



202 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

and who evidently desires to do nothing under a false 
pretense, has modified this by having painted be- 
neath it in brackets '' a little," so that the visitor 
who speaks no French need not be disappointed as to 
the amount or purity of his native language which 
he will hear. At present, however, both the Madame 
and " Charlie " are tolerably well up in the language, 
and their stock is inexhaustible upon any thing re- 
lating to buckwheat cakes or pumpkin pies. 

The establishment is a mystery and a wonderment 
to the uninitiated, who frequently stop and gaze with 
a certain sort of awe into the window. What these 
queer-looking things are, they can have no idea, and 
then the cabalistic English words upon the window 
add to the bewilderment. There are two of these, 
however, which they can full}^ understand: "mince" 
in French means " thin," and " pie " is the name of a 
species of bird ; and so their curiosity is in part satis- 
fied at ascertaining the fact that one of the American 
''specialities" is " thin magpie." ' 

Most of our countrymen who visit Paris find out 
now the establishment of Madame Busque. Her reg- 
ister of visitors for the past ten years is a literary cu- 
riosity which should not be overlooked. Here are 
the names of ministers and ex-ministers and consuls, 
members of Congress, artists, authors, poets, journal- 
ists, and commoners. 



THE "SPECIALITY DE PUMPKIN PIE." 203 

Such is the " Sp^cialite de Pumpkin Pie." Long 
may it flourish, and long may good Madame Busque 
preside over its destinies. It is really a pleasant little 
oasis in the great desert of Paris, and no American 
who loves his country and her institutions, visiting 
the world's capital, should neglect to renew his devo- 
tion to them bj^ going there and eating his fill. 




CHAPTER XII. 

WHAT AND HOW MUCH THE PAEISIANS DRIKK. 

Drunkenness. — Wine-drinking. — " The Octroi " Duty. — Extensive 
Establishments. — Parisian Cafes. — American Drinks. — Marchands 
de Vin. — Absinthe-drinking. — "A little Absinthe, just to give an 
Appetite." — Composition of Absinthe, and its fearful Effects, 

npHB people of Paris, numbering 1,700,000, con- 
-■^ sume annually about forty-four millions of gal- 
lons of wine of all descriptions ; of alcohol and alco- 
holic liquors, about one million seven hundred and 
sixty thousand gallons ; of cider, four hundred and 
forty thousand gallons ; and of beer, six millions six 
hundred and sixty thousand gallons ; which is near- 
ly twenty-eight gallons of wine, beer, and spirits 
combined, annually consumed by each man, wom- 
an, and child within the city limits. The consump- 
tion of strong liquors has been gradually increasing 
for some years past, while that of wine has met 
with a proportionate diminution, and drunkenness, 
with all its attendant evils, follows in the track. It 
is a great mistake to suppose that there is no in- 
toxication in the wine-growing countries of Europe ; 
although my observations correspond with those of 
other travellers who state that, as a rule, the abuse of 



WHAT THE PAEISIANS DRINK. 206 

liquors is confined almost entirely to the cities and 
larger towns, certain it is that Paris is by no means 
exempt from this vice, which, however, does not ex- 
hibit its evil effects in any thing like the glaring col- 
ors that it does in London and the American cities. 
As a rule, also, drunkenness is confined to the lower 
classes of the people. A soldier will drink as long as 
his ability to pay, or the good-nature of the keeper 
of the tabaret lasts, and one may often see the rep- 
resentatives of the brave army of France reeling 
through the streets of Paris. The chiffonniers^ or rag- 
pickers, seem to consider it a religious duty to get 
drunk daily, and workmen who make two half holi- 
days on Sunday and Monday afternoons often go 
drunk to bed on both these occasions. 

Still, with the acknowledgment of the existence 
of inebriety in Paris to a considerable extent, it is 
safe to say that one will not see as many drunken 
men in the streets in a month as he will in a day in 
London, or a week in Few York. 

Wine, for all who can afford it, is the universal 
drink at breakfast and dinner ; while the dusty bot- 
tles of Chateau Margaux and St. Estephe are opened 
at the tables of the rich, the mechanic, or the labor- 
ing man and his family, add cheer to their homely 
meal by a litre of the cheap wine of Burgundy, which 
may be purchased for twelve sous (which is at the 



206 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

rate of about half a crown a gallon) at the wine-mer- 
chants' shops, which are found on nearly every cor- 
ner. "Workmen may often make their noonday meal 
with two sous' worth of bread, which they take to the 
nearest wine-shop, where for five or six sous more 
a pint of wine can be purchased, and with which the 
system is strengthened and slightly exhilarated. The 
cost of wine in Paris is materially augmented by the 
octroi^ or city duty, which is charged upon all eata- 
bles and drinkables which enter the gates, and which 
yields to the city an annual revenue of about seven- 
ty -five millions of francs. At each one of the gates 
of Paris is a little stone building, the Octroi Office, 
where night and day the collectors of the city reve- 
nue are stationed, and where duties are levied at the 
following rates : wine in wood, per hectolitre of 22 
gallons, 18 francs ; in bottle, 25 francs ; brandy and 
spirits, liqueurs^ brandied fruits, and scented spirits, 23 
francs 50 centimes ; perry and cider, 7 francs 80 cen- 
times ; beer brought to Paris, 8 francs 80 centimes ; 
beer brewed in Paris, 2 francs 82 centimes. 

Every cart passing the gate is examined, every 
omnibus coming from without the city is looked into, 
as is every private or public carriage, and the lid of 
every basket carried on the arm is lifted up by the 
sharp-eyed collector ; and if an unfortunate chicken 
or half a dozen of eggs are found inside, the duty is 



WHAT THE PARISIANS DRINK. 207 

rigidly exacted. Even the person is not exempt from 
search ; and^ince the introduction of the present fash- 
ion of extended skirts, cases have not unfrequentlj 
been brought to light in which females have been 
caught in the act of attempting to smuggle dutiable 
articles strung among the folds of their crinolines. 

The considerable augmentation of the value of ar- 
ticles of food and drink, caused bj the city duty, led 
to the establishment of immense restaurants and wine- 
shops just outside the ancient barrier walls, and which 
were resorted to by working-people, many of whom 
lived in the city. On Sunday, particularly in sum- 
mer, these places were thronged, and on this day 
many of the citizens of Paris went out to the better 
class of restaurants to dine, and every grisette expect- 
ed her lover to pay for a dinner there. Two of these 
establishments, the wine-shop of the Petit Ram^on- 
neau^ at the Barrier e de Clichy^ and the Restaurant 
Richefeu^ at the Barriere du Maine^ used to furnish on 
Sundays drink and food to about twenty -five thou- 
sand people. This last is an immense building five 
stories in height, each floor of which is a spacious 
room filled with tables, where luncheon, with half a 
bottle of wine, is served up for fifteen sous. 

A population of more than three hundred thou- 
sand people, principally of the poorer class, grew up 
between the barrier wall and the fortifications. But 



208 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

on the first of January, 1859, tlie city limits were ex- 
tended to the fortifications themselves, which are at 
such a distance from the heart of Paris that it will 
be many years ere such gay and lively scenes will be 
exhibited around them as formed, in bygone years, 
the great attractions of the ancient barriers. 

A very large portion of the male population of 
Paris spend their time in the cafes^ many of which are 
elegantly furnished, and where, in addition to the de- 
licious black coffee, other attractions are offered in 
the way of dominos, chess, and cards. Thousands of 
Parisians go every morning to the ca/e, where the 
first breakfast, consisting of a large cup of coffee and 
a single roll, is taken, and the newspapers read. At 
twelve or one o'clock the true breakfast, the dejeuner 
d la fou7xheUe, is eaten^ and the time then employed 
till dinner, after which the true Parisian immediately 
proceeds to his cafe again, where he reads the evening 
journals over a cup of strong black coffee, taken with 
a small glass of brandy, and the remainder of the 
evening is spent in conversation or games. But little 
strong liquor is drunk in the cafes, except with coffee, 
over a cup of which a Parisian will often sit for an 
entire evening, as he will also over such mild bever- 
ages as orgeat and water, or a glass of current or rasp- 
berry syrup, or even that modest, calming, and cer- 
tainlj^ unstimulating drink, a glass of sugar and wa- 



WHAT THE PARISIANS DRINK. 209 

ter. Attempts have been made from time to time 
by bardy innovators to introduce some of the thou- 
sand and one "American drinks" into the Parisian 
cafes ; but with the exception of the " sherry cobbler,',' 
which may be obtained at some of them, and a hot 
decoction of rum, sugar, water, and lemon, which is 
universally known as " Grog Americain," none of 
these mixtures have been able to obtain a foothold 
among the Parisians, whose stomachs have not yet 
been rendered sufficiently fireproof to enable them to 
take such abominations as " brandy cocktails " and 
"smashes." For the accommodation of our transat- 
lantic cousins, however, who, even in a foreign land, 
still cling to the institutions of their country, and who 
must have their " bitters " before or after breakfast 
and dinner, and around whom linger fond memories 
of "mint-juleps," "milk-punches," and "egg-nogs," 
for these, and for such benighted foreigners as desire 
to be initiated into the mysteries of these compounds, 
two or three cafes in Paris now furnish " American 
drinks." 

At the corner shops of the wine-sellers the lower 
classes of the Parisian people go to drink. In these 
there are no opportunities for being seated as in the 
cafes^ but the drink is taken at the bar. Here wine is 
sold at two and three sous a glass, as well as a fiery 
sort of brandy distilled from beet-root, and known to 



210 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

the imbibers under the slang name of casse-poitrine 
(literally, break-breast), is sold at one, two, and three 
sous the small glass. Many of the wine-sellers fur- 
nish meals, principally to laborers, who may be seen 
at nine o'clock in the morning, when the}^ quit work 
on the neighboring buildings for an hour, going to 
these places for breakfast, each with two sous' worth 
of bread, purchased at the nearest baker's, under his 
arm. 

One of the most popular, and in fact almost a uni- 
versal beverage in Paris, is absinthe. In front of the 
splendid cafes on the Boulevards, on any fine after- 
noon between three and five o'clock, thousands of per- 
sons may be seen sitting, mixing and sipping this 
green liquor, which is taken ostensibly as an appetizer 
before dinner. "Workmen drink it in the low corner 
shops of the marchands de vin. In various parts of 
the city are establishments which are crowded from 
rnorning till night, in which the sale of absinthe is 
made a specialite^ and where little else is drunk. La- 
dies even of high families are reported to have yielded 
to its fascinations. It has been exported, and is used 
to an enormous extent in all the French colonies, ex- 
cept in Tahiti, where its introduction has been pro- 
hibited, and statistics exhibit the fact that immense 
quantities of it are annually sent to the United States. 
It may not, therefore, be uninteresting to those who 



WHAT THE PARISIANS DRINK. 211 

are in the habit of "taking a little absinthe before 
dinner just to give them an appetite," to be made ac- 
quainted with the composition and effects of this se- 
ductive liquor, which, from the almost irresistible 
power which it wields over its victims, as well as from 
the similarity of its effects, and the general and in- 
creasing popularity it has acquired, may not improp- 
erly be called " The Opium of the West." 

Medical science has turned its attention to the ef- 
fects of this poisonous compound, and in a paper re- 
cently submitted to the Academy of Medicine by M. 
Motet, the whole subject is treated in a manner which 
shows that he has carefully examined it. He says 
that the habitual use of ahsintlie produces a series of 
pathological manifestations extremely grave, and dif- 
fering essentially from the effects produced by other 
alcoholic drinks ; and although the effects of large 
doses, or of the habitual use of this liquor, are now 
well known, the drinker upon whom the habit of 
using it has been fastened returns to it in obedience 
to an almost irresistible- fascination while aware that 
it is destroying him. 

Body and mind crumble alike under the influence 
of this terrible liquor. It destroys all the finer feel- 
ings and more delicate sensibilities of human nature ; 
it absorbs all the faculties, burns and corrodes the 
body, extinguishes the memory, and annihilates the 



212 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

senses. Of the best constituted man, either physical- 
ly or intellectually, its constant use will, sooner or 
later, make a skeleton, an animal — a brute. 

^^ Ahsinthe^^'' which simply means "wormwood," is 
made by the distillation of a number of plants — the 
tops of wormwood, flag-root, anise-seed, angelica- 
root, leaves of littany {origanum dictamuus) and sweet 
marjoram. All these are macerated, and placed in 
alcohol of very high proof, and permitted to remain 
eight days, when the mixture is distilled, half an 
ounce of the essential oil of anise being added to each 
three gallons. The first care after the distillation is 
to see whether the liquor is of a good color, and 
whether it will " whiten" well; and should it be found 
lacking in these essential points, it is brought up to 
the proper standard with indigo, tincture of curcuma, 
hyssop, nettles, and sulphate of copper (the ordinary 
"blue vitriol"). 

Absinthe^ however, requires none of these adulter- 
ations to constitute it a positive poison. Composed 
of plants of highly exciting qualities, united with the 
strongest alcohol, it acts directlj^ upon the nervous 
system, having a much more speedy and positive ef- 
fect than other alcoholic liquors. Indeed, one of the 
principal charms which make the vile compound so 
popular, is the almost immediate delightfully stim- 
ulating effect it has upon the brain. In the process 



WHAT THE PARISIANS PRINK. 218 

of distillation, the plants furnish several volatile oils, 
which are among the most virulent poisons. Prob- 
ably few persons, in "mixing" their absinthe (which 
among professional drinkers is considered a great art), 
have ever stopped to consider the cause of the "whit- 
ening" or "clouding," or ever thought that the better 
the liquor " mixes," the more powerfully poisonous it 
is. The white deposit which, in precipitating, renders 
it turbid, comes from the essential oils, which are held 
in solution bj alcohol, but which are insoluble in 
water or weak spirits. 

The effects of the constant use of this villainous 
liquor, which a friend once said " is kept in glass bot- 
tles simply because it would eat through the staves of 
any ordinary barrel in fifteen minutes," are summed 
up in a sentence by Dr. Motet as a " general poisoning 
of the system, which terminates in insanity and death." 
Among the symptoms which precede the final result 
are uncertainty and indecision of the muscular sj^stem, 
easily recognized by contractions and trembling of 
the fore-arm, of the hand, and the inferior members. 
Strange sensations are observed, such as tingling and 
pricking of the skin, heaviness of the limbs and numb- 
ness, the hand seizing and as suddenly letting go any 
object within its reach. The patients are weak in 
the legs, and, in standing, require something to lean 
against ; the knees tremble and bend ; a general air 



214 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

of sadness and hebetude settles upon the features ; the 
lips, the tongue, and the muscles of the face are trem- 
ulous ; the eye is sunken and sorrowful ; the skin as- 
sumes a yellowish hue ; dyspepsia and wasting away 
follow; the mucous membrane becomes of a violet 
color; the hair comes out, and the entire framework 
of the man falls into a premature old age and dilapi- 
dation. 

Such are the bodily symptoms of absinthe poison ; 
and the mental troubles progress concurrently with 
the disorders of the muscular system. Owing to 
the progress of the disease of the brain, the sleep of 
the patient is disturbed ; he has terrible dreams and 
nightmares, and sudden wakings, as though he had 
been shot from the mouth o.f a cannon ; he is troubled 
with hallucinations, illusions, blinding of the eyes, and 
hypochondria; exhibits a very marked embarrassment 
and dwelling upon words when speaking, and a con- 
stantly decreasing strength of intellect. Such is, in a 
few words, the sad cortege of symptoms presented by 
the victims of the terrible absinthe poison ; a cortege 
which only precedes another one following them to 
the grave. 

Nothing, says Dr. Motet, can arrest the progress of 
the brain disease. Sometimes the symptoms will be 
more favorable for a longer or shorter period, but the 
respite must not be considered as a sign of approach- 



WHAT THE PARISIANS DRINK. • 215 

ing cure ; and, a little sooner or a little later, death 
stalks in, in the midst of epileptic attacks, at a time 
when there is scarcely any human intelligence remain- 
ing — when the animal alone exists, and in a state of 
degradation of which no description can convey an 
adequate idea. 

This is certainly not a cheerful picture to contem- 
plate, nor is it agreeable to think that this is a fate 
in store for those thousands of cheerful, healthy-look- 
ing men, young and middle-aged, who daily sip their 
ohsinthe on the Boulevards. Death and insanity, the 
result of its habitual use, are very common in Paris ; 
and oh the tombstones of not a* few of the prominent 
men in the literary and artistic world whose lights 
have gone out during the past ten years, might with 
truth be written, "died of absinthe." 

So deleterious have been the effects of this liquor 
that the French Government has prohibited its use 
in the army and navy, even to the officers, and an 
attempt is now being made to extend the same re- 
striction to the other colonies which has been made 
in regard to Tahiti. And yet, with all these terrible 
facts brought to light, it is by no means probable that 
the use of this murderous beverage is decreasing. 
Who, after the picture above drawn, would like to 
take a "little absinthe ^w^t to give him an appetite?" 




CHAPTEE XIII. 

A FLYING TRIP IN THE COUNTRY. 

Orleans and "the Maid." — Chambord. — Blois. — Amboise. — Plessis 
les Tours.— A curious Village. — Houses cut in the solid Rock. — 
Chinon. — Angers. — The Castle of Bluebeard. — Down the Loire. 
— Brittany. 

TTN the latter part of August a genial companion 
-*- and myself started from Paris, with a sufiS.cient 
supply of funds and linen to last us a fortnight or 
three weeks. Trusting in our guiding-stars and Mur- 
ray's Guide-book, we determined to go first to Orleans, 
and thence wherever inclination led us, and railway 
trains and diligences would carry us. 

We found Orleans a quaint old town on the banks 
of the LoirCj famous in modern history as the spot 
where Joan of Arc raised the siege which the English 
were holding upon the place, and from which she drove 
the invaders away. The story is familiar to all read- 
ers of history and romance, but it is pleasant some- 
times to re-read old tales ; and none is more interest- 
ing than that of the brave girl who saved her King 
and country, and won for herself the crown of mar- 
tyrdom. 

In the year 1429, when the English had invaded, 



A FLYING TRIP IN THE COUNTRY. 217 

and were in actual possession of, a large portion of 
France, Charles the Seventh, a weak monarch, was 
king. Deeming the task a hopeless one, he had relin- 
quished the idea of resisting the English, and had re- 
tired from the noise and danger of war to his strongly- 
fortified castle of Chinon. Here he found more pleasure 
in the society of his beautiful mistress, Agnes Sorel, than 
■upon the field of battle or on the march. Surround- 
ed by his courtiers, he was not a little surprised one 
day in February, after the news of the march on Or- 
leans by the English troops, under the Count of Salis- 
bury, had reached him, to learn that a girl of eighteen 
years, professing to be inspired of God with knowl- 
edge, and with power to make the King's army tri- 
umph, had arrived at the Church of St. Catherine de 
Fierbois, near Chinon ; that she was attired in male 
apparel, and demanded instant audience. 

After several days spent in consultation with his 
ministers, who declared the girl insane, the j)uceUe, on 
whose sweet and youthful face rested an expression 
of the utmost modesty, but whose eye seemed lighted 
with the fire of inspiration, appeared in the hall among 
the gay throng; and although she had never before 
seen the King, singled him out from amidst the crowd, ' 
many of whom were much more richly. attired than 
he, and told him that she had been sent by God to 
aid him and his kingdom, and that the Kingof Heav- 

10 



218 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

en had told her that he must be crowned at Eeims, 
and become the " lieutenant of the King of Heaven" — 
a title of right belonging to the sovereign of France. 
Leading him aside to a window, she easily convinced 
him of her supernatural powers by telling him some 
of the inmost secrets of his heart, which she declared 
her '' voices " had revealed to her. Brought the next 
day before a clerical council and severely interrogated, 
the King finally decreed to give her a command of 
six thousand men, and to send her to raise the siege 
of Orleans. A sword, taken from the Church of St. 
Catherine, was now presented her, and the standard 
which she herself had designed, and which bore a fig- 
ure of the Saviour carrying a globe, painted on a 
white ground strewed with i}iQ fleur-de-lis^ was placed 
in her hand. Mounted astride a young and active 
horse, the Maid started for Orleans. 

The English were then occupying a fort on the op- 
posite side of the Loire near a bridge which crossed 
it, and Joan decided that this post should be first at- 
tacked. The most skillful of the French commanders 
opposed this, but were finally forced to yield, as the 
soldiers, to whom she had imparted a portion of her 
enthusiasm, would obey no other leader. The bridge 
being partly destroyed, they pushed across the Loire 
in boats and began the attack upon the English fort. 
At length, seeing her countrymen falter, the Maid, 



A FLYING TRIP IN THE COUNTRY. 219 

seizing a scaling-ladder, niounted the escalade, when 
an arrow pierced her corslet, and she fell as if dead 
into the ditch. Some soldiers carried her away, but 
she soon returned again to the attack, and, waving 
aloft her magic banner, led on her countrymen in a 
desperate but successful assault. The English leader 
was killed, the fort surrendered, and that same even- 
ing the young shepherdess of Dourremy^ whom the 
English in the morning had tauntingly advised to '' go 
home and mind her cows," entered Orleans in tri- 
umph from the bridge which had been closed for sev- 
eral months, bringing with her a supply of provisions 
to feed the half-starved citizens. 

It was not strange, as she rode through the streets 
of Orleans upon her charger, dressed in full armor, 
her countenance brilliant with a light which seemed 
more of heaven than earth, that the famished people 
looked upon her as an angel sent for their relief, and 
that stern, rough, bearded men prostrated themselves 
before the feet of her horse, and that women held up 
their children for her blessing. 

The following day the English retreated, and 
France was saved. The subsequent history of this 
girl is a disgrace alike to France and England. Aft- 
er following the king, standing over him at his coro- 
nation, and leading his armies successfully against the 
English, she was at length taken prisoner at Com- 



220 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

peigne through the treachery of her own countrymen, 
conveyed to Eouen, and burnt alive in the market- 
place as a sorceress. "Well may her countrymen now 
raise monuments and revere the memory of the gentle, 
patriotic girl. 

Before breakfast the next morning we visited all the 
points of interest in Orleans connected with the history 
of the Maid. There are three statues — one, a fine 
equestrian one, in the principal square ; another upon 
the bridge, and the third, a copy in bronze of the statue 
now at Yersailles, the work of the talented Princess 
Marie d'Orleans, the daughter of Louis Philippe. The 
room in which it is said Joan lodged, when she entered 
the town from Blois, is shown, but the locality is rather 
apocryphal; and it is probable that the benevolent- 
looking old lady who leads strangers into it has an 
eye more to the franc which she receives for her serv- 
ices than to the verification of history. But the 
spot where the fort held by the English stood is well 
marked, some remains of it being still visible. A rude 
stone cross is erected there, upon which is inscribed 
"In memory of Jeanne d' Arc, known as 'The Maid,' 
the pious heroine, who, on the 8th of May, 1429, in 
this place, saved by her valor the city, France, and 
her Ring." 

In the afternoon we went to Blois, and the next 
day visited the Chateau of Chambord, an imposing 



A FLYING TRIP IN THE COUNTRY. 221" 

Structure built in 1526 by Francis the First. It is 
now the private property of the Count de Chambord, 
the son of the Duchess de Berri, and the only male 
survivor of the elder branch of the French Bourbons, 
who, should they be recalled to power during his life, 
would, under the title of Henry the Fifth, be King 
of France. Francis the First, Henry the Second, 
Charles the Ninth, Louis the Fourteenth, and Louis 
the Fifteenth, all lived here. In the first Eevolution 
the chateau was taken, and very much defaced, the 
fleur-de-lis which covered the walls being beaten out 
with hammers. Only one of these emblems of the 
Bourbon dynasty escaped — a stone lily, six feet in 
height, which rose above one of the towers. This was 
knocked down during the Eevolution of 1848, but the 
present Emperor has permitted it to be restored, and 
the insignia of his race now again surmount the 
tower of the only building in France belonging to its 
last representative. 

At Blois is the old castle which for ages has been 
the residence of the kings of France, and the scene 
of some of the most tragical events in its historj^ 
Here it was that Henry the Third, incited by his 
fiendish mother, Catherine de Medicis, plotted and 
perpetrated the murder of the Duke de Guise, and 
his brother, the Cardinal de Lorraine. The room in 
which the deed was done is shown, as is also the ora- 



222 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

tory at the side, where Catherine prostrated herself 
before the altar, and prayed that the murder might be 
successfully performed. The Castle of Blois occupies 
a frowning position on the summit of a hill overlook- 
ing the town, and is now used as a barrack. From 
Blois we took the train for Amboise, a ride of a lit- 
tle less than an hour. The high and frowning tow- 
ers of the Castle of Amboise, which overhang the 
Loire, with its donjons and ouhliettes^ and dark cells, 
has been the scene of some terrible tragedies. The 
most horrible of these was the hanging upon its walls 
of twelve hundred Huguenot prisoners, arrested in the 
time of the religious wars in 1560 for their participa- 
tion in the plot known as the " Conjuration d' Am- 
boise." The executioners became wearied with be- 
heading their victims, and so drowned them in the 
Loire. Standing upon the balcony, it was scarcely 
possible to realize that all these horrors had been 
enacted amidst such scenes of grandeur and beauty. 
The old castle stands on a lofty rocky height, at the 
foot of which glides the sunny, beautiful Loire, its 
banks green with vines, on which the purple fruit 
hung in rich clusters. Above, the river winds 
among islands, and ripples laughingly by the frown- 
ing old castle. The castle, though well cared for, is 
crumbling to ruins ; but the river is broad and sunny, 
and its banks are verdant as ever, and the sky — the 



A FLYING TRIP IN THE COUNTRY. 223 

sky of this beautiful Tourraine— as blue and clear as 
it was on the day when, beneath it, the river ran red 
with the blood of a thousand martyrs. 

It was in this castle that Charles the Eighth, at the 
age of twenty-eight years, was killed while running 
under a stone door-way, hurrying to his tennis-court, 
by hitting his head against the top-stone, which had 
been placed inconveniently low. Here it was that 
Abd-el-Kader, the brave and noble emir of Algiers, 
was imprisoned by Louis Philippe, and released in 
1852 by the Emperor. 

From Amboise we went to Tours, a beautiful old 
town on the Loire, which contains a fine cathedral 
and the remains of a church built by St. Martin in the 
third century. About a mile from the town is Pies- 
sis les Tours, the favorite residence of Louis the 
Eleventh. Little remains of it now but a single tow- 
er, and some extraordinary cells in which the royal 
bigot confined his prisoners, whom he subjected to a 
novel punishment, called " enwalling." Around the 
walls of this subterranean dungeon were little spaces, 
cut about two feet into the wall, and four feet high, 
and in one of these a prisoner was placed, inclosed 
with an iron grating, through which he breathed the 
dank air of the dungeon. In these living tombs one 
could neither lie down, nor stand upright, nor sit in a 
comfortable position ; but the power of human endur- 



224 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

ance is shown by the fact that the Cardinal Balue 
(who is said to have been the inventor of this hor- 
rid system of punishment) remained in one of them 
seven years. Near these dungeons is the oratory 
where the King passed hours at a time in abject 
prayer, to the Virgin and saints for the cure of his 
complicated maladies, and here he finally ended his 
miserable existence. "They had hard hearts in 
those days," remarked the girl who showed us the 
remains of the castle as she pointed us out the 
cells. 

About four miles distant from Tours is the curious 
village of Eochecorbon, which consists of dwellings 
cut in the solid rock two hundred feet above its base ; 
the rock itself being bold^nd bluff, they can only be 
reached by ladders. In one place an immense boul- 
der has become detached from the cliff, and in this, 
which from below looks as though it were liable to 
fall at any moment, two dwellings are excavated. 
These excavations were made hundreds of years ago 
by the retainers of the feudal barons who lived here, 
with a view to economy and to safety. Here are the 
remains of a feudal castle of the eleventh century, all 
that is left of it now being a stone tower, a hut fifty 
feet in height, which stands tottering on the very 
verge of the chff three or four hundred feet above the 
bank of the river. 



A FLYING TRIP IN THE COUNTRY. 225 

Eeturning to Tours, we next day took the dil- 
igence* and rode thirty miles across the country, 
through vineyard and by acacia hedges, to the old 
town of Chinon, where there are the remains of a cas- 
tle, now entirely in decay, in which Charles the Sev- 
enth received Joan of Arc, and where he first saw his 
beautiful and talented mistress, Agnes Sorel, who ex- 
ercised so powerful an influence on his life and the 
fortunes of France. The scene of these interviews, 
and of the splendor of the court of the indolent and 
pleasure-loving King, is now a sad and broken ruin, 
and crows were cawing dismally from its wall-tops. 
Near it is a square tower, over a deep ditch, supposed 
to have been one of the '■^oubliettes'''' down which 
prisoners were cast, and " forgotten" forever. In one 
of these towers Eichard of the Lion Heart was im- 
prisoned by his father, Henry the Second, for conspir- 
ing to dethrone him. It is now converted into the 
ice-house of the town of Chinon, as is the donjon into 
a powder-magazine. Beneath it is an extensive sub- 
terranean prison, reached by descending stone steps, 
which have been nearly worn away during the long 
centuries in which they have been trodden by prison- 
ers and visitors. All along the walls of this under- 
ground dungeon are the names of prisoners who were 
buried in that living tomb, cut in the rocks. Some 
of them dated 1420. It was a relief to ascend from 

10^ 



226 AN AMEKICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

this dank and noisome den, smelling like a tomb, up 
again into the clear sunlight, and to gaze upon the 
scene which presents itself in the lovely valley. God, 
the great Architect and Artist, builds lofty hills, and 
spreads out fertile river-banks, and drapes themr with 
verdure, and paints them with beautiful flowers, and 
bathes them all with the bright and glowing sunshine, 
and man digs dungeons in which to hide his fellows 
from the view. 

From Chinon we went to Angers, a black-looking; 
dull old town, containing a strong castle and a fine 
cathedral, and from here we made a pleasant little 
excursion to the scene of one of the most celebrated 
of romances, and where we laid aside for the time our 
history and dwelt again in the youthful days, when 
we were alternately charmed and- frightened as we 
read our fairy tales. At Champtoce, distant about 
fifteen miles from Angers, on a green and beautiful 
hillside overlooking the Loire, are the imposing ruins 
of a feudal castle, in which lived in the fifteenth cen- 
tury one Gilles de Ketz, known throughout the coun- 
try as Le Barbe Bleu, and the undoubted original of 
the horrid monster who, under the name of "Blue- 
beard," astonished and alarmed our childhoods. This 
interesting character, having lost health and fortune 
by youthful excesses and extravagances, believed that 
he could restore both by the use of a bath of infants' 



A FLYING TRIP IN THE COUNTRY. 227 

blood, and -for this purpose he is said to have killed 
no less than a hundred babes. In those days the 
born thralls of a feudal seigneur would bear a great 
deal from their master, but the crimes of the gentle 
Gilles finally became so bold and frequent that all 
the country about rebelled, and he was tried and duly 
burnt at Nantes, after relieving his mind with a full 
confession. 

Two towers of the castle, overgrown with moss 
and ivy, and rapidly crumbling to ruin, still rise above 
the underground dungeons, in which the deeds of 
blood were committed. It was with difficulty that I 
could persuade my guide to go with me as far as the 
entrance of one of these subterranean cells, and I be- 
lieve no inducement would have taken him with me 
into it. The peasants give the castle a wide berth 
after dark; children will not play around the ruins; 
and to this day the mothers of Anjou frighten their 
nurslings into propriety by threatening to confine 
them in the ruined castle of Le Barbe Bleu. 

At Angers we took a little tea-pot-power steam- 
boat down the Loire to Nantes. The river for the 
entire distance is beautiful, its banks densely grown 
with flax and vines, and rising often to lofty heights, 
whose summits are crowned with crumbling old cas- 
tle-towers and spired churches. We reached Nantes 
in about seven hours, and, after visiting the castle in 



228 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

whicli Henry the Fourth signed the celebrated edict, 
which gave freedom to the French Protestants, left 
the following morning for a ride across Brittany in a 
diligence. 

Brittany, of all portions of France is the most out- 
landish. There is some fine land and scenery in it, 
but generally it is barren and poverty-stricken. The 
people retain many of their ancient customs, and have 
been but little, disturbed by modern innovations. The 
peasants still dress in goat-skins, and the girls and 
old women and female children all wear the Breton 
cap, which extends nearly half a yard above and be- 
hind the head at an angle of about forty-five degrees. 
They live in a very homely manner, make and drink 
but very little wine, using cider instead. They have 
no barns in which to deposit their hay and grain, 
but leave it in the open air, the grain being threshed 
on the ground where it is cut. The land is all cut 
up into small irregular patches, each one being sur- 
rounded by a border of trees, which effectually shut 
out the sunshine except at noon-day. They retain 
many of the Druidical superstitions and practices of 
the ages previous to the introduction of Christianity, 
and to this day the peasant-women of Brittany who 
desire to have male children go at midnight to some 
of the Druidical remains with which the country 
abounds, and rub their breasts against them. In short, 



A FLYINQ TRIP IN THE COUNTRY. 



229 



these people Jive and act in many things just as their 
ancestors did a thousand years ago, and are an aston- 
ishing example of primitive simplicity, in this age of 
art and innovation. 





CHAPTEE XIY. 

PAEISIAN THEATRES. 

Annoyances— The " Claque."— Its Origin and Object.— The Censor- 
ship. — The Acting. — Specialities of different Theatres. 

13^I^IS is certainly the paradise of theatrical raan- 
-*- agers — the theatres within its limits, although the 
most uncomfortable in the world, being always crowd- 
ed. The visitor who succeeds in sitting through a 
performance without once having his temper ruffled, 
is entitled to a first prize for amiability of character. 

There is no ventilation, and besides being crowded, 
one stews. And then there is the claque continually 
breaking in with vigorous applause ; and the moment 
the curtain drops, the air is rent with the yells of 
wretches with cas>iron lungs crying apples, oranges, 
and candies for sale. 

The claque is one of the most annoying among the 
many nuisances which afflict the Paris theatres. 

Seated usually in the parquette, immediately be- 
hind the orchestra seats and directly under the chan- 
delier, a row of persons, varying from half a dozen 
to thirty, may be seen every evening, wet or dry, who 
never get tired of seeing the same piece, and who 



PARISIAN THEATRES. 281 

never forget to applaud in the proper places, provided 
always they have been properly paid therefor. This 
is the claque^ whose presence saves the Parisian thea- 
tre-goer the labor of applauding for himself 

In the midst of the party sits the chef^ who gives 
the cue when to applaud, to whom the rest look for 
all their instructions, and the movement of whose 
hands they follow. The chef is paid a certain sum 
by the management of the theatre, but his principal 
receipts are from authors who are about producing 
new pieces, from young actors and actresses, or those 
who desire to create an unusual sensation. The chef 
furnishes the remainder of the claque^ requiring them 
sometimes to pay a small sum in addition to their 
services when the piece draws very crowded houses ; 
admitting them for nothing, under ordinary circum- 
stances, and paying them a little when there is not 
sufficient attraction to induce them to give their val- 
uable aid, in consideration of witnessing the perform- 
ance. The claque is an " institution" — the success of 
a piece or an artist depending, in great measure, upon 
its efforts. The measure of success is generally ar- 
ranged in advance. For a consideration, a ^' grand 
success" is guaranteed; but if the author or artist is 
short of funds, or haggles with the king of the claque, 
a 'kittle success" only is promised. A degree still 
lower, sometimes stipulated for, is to '' save the piece 



232 AN AMEEICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

or the artist from being damned;" and if no arrange- 
meet at all is made, the members of the claque only 
applaud just enough to save themselves and their 
places. The whole thing is graduated in this manner, 
and satisfactory conditions having been arranged, the 
places where the applause is to come in, and where 
encores are to be demanded, are all marked and stud- 
ied by the chef as an actor would study his part. 

Nobody, of course, is deceived by this artificial ar- 
rangement. Every habitue of a Parisian theatre very 
well knows that the "thunders of applause" which 
burst out periodically from beneath the chandelier 
are paid for at so much a clap ; and that the seedy 
but, on the whole, respectable-looking individual who 
controls the movements of his band, is not a mere pa- 
tron and lover of the dramatic art, who finds it a pleas- 
ure as well as duty to assist in the development of 
genius, and to crown it with a meed of applause, but 
that he is a mere mercenary. And yet the Parisian 
theatres can not, or at least their managers think they 
can not, succeed without the aid of the claque. 

A few years since, awakened to the absurdity of 
the system, the nuisance was suppressed in all the 
theatres. A week afterward it was restored, the art- 
ists themselves complaining, and asserting that they 
could not act without it. Applause was a stimulant 
as necessarv to them as air and light, and the audi- 



PARISIAN THEATRES. 233 

ences, accustomed to manifest their enthusiasm by 
proxy, would not applaud, and so the efforts of the 
artists fell dead upon the house. The restored claque, 
finding itself master of the situation, became more de- 
manding and impudent than ever, and the old system 
now flourishes in full vigor. Frequent difficulties 
arise, however, in some of the better theatres between 
the audience and the claque, demonstrations decidedly 
hostile to the latter being made by the former, and cries 
of " down with the claque^' being often uttered with 
a vim which proves that if Parisian audiences had 
the will, they certainly have the power to make noise 
enough to gratify any reasonable demand of the actors. 

The origin of the claque dates back to the year 
1804, and it first became an " institution " at the Come- 
die Frangaise. At this time two rival actresses, M'lle 
Duchenois and M'lle George, were "strutting their lit- 
tle hour upon the stage." Each had her partisans, 
who nightly applauded their favorite, and endeavored 
to out-applaud their opponents. M'lle George being 
a favorite of the Emperor Napoleon, and the noisiest 
demonstrations being made in her behalf, the Govern- 
ment did not interfere, and the result was that the 
claque soon became a permanent affair, and was trans- 
planted to all the other theatres. 

The charges for admission into the Parisian thea- 
tres are higher than in those of our cities — good seats 



234 AN AMEEICAN JOUKNALIST IN EUKOPE. 

in the best theatres costing from five to ten francs 
each, and more, if taken in advance. The expenses 
of the theatres are very heavy, ten per cent, of the 
gross receipts being paid over to the hospital fund, 
besides a large percentage, amounting to about one- 
tenth more, to the authors of the pieces played. ^ 

Three of the theatres, the Opera Frangais^ or Im- 
perial Academy of Music, the Comedie Frangaise^ and 
the Odeouj receive subventions from the Government 
for the purpose of encouraging and sustaining a pure 
and classical taste for lyric and dramatic art. The 
theatres are under the immediate control of the Min- 
ister of State ; and all pieces, before being produced, 
must be sanctioned by him, and pass the ordeal of a 
rigid censorship, which is intended to protect the 
morals and politics of the Parisians from danger of 
harm. The censors are particularly cautious that 
nothing which may possibly tend, either directly or 
remotely, toward diminishing the faith of the people 
in the present Government and its form shall pass 
through their hands, while they are considerably more 
lenient toward productions of another description. 

Until recently, the theatres were subjected to a 
special control, and restricted to certain styles of plays. 
For example, a theatre devoted to the "legitimate 
drama" would not be permitted to play spectacular 
pieces, introduce dancing upon the stage, or in any 



PARISIAN THEATRES. 235 

manner infringe upon its " speciality." This has now 
been changed; and not only can any one who chooses 
establish a theatre, but the manager can cause to be 
performed any character of play from high tragedy 
to pantomime. Two large and comfortable theatres, 
roomy and well ventilated, the Lyrique and the Thea- 
tre du Chatelet^ have also been opened. The former 
is an opera-house, and at the latter "spectacles" are 
gotten up in the most gorgeous style. 

The French comedians and actresses are unquestion- 
ably the best in the world, because, as a rule, there is 
with them no straining for mere effect. The " vein of 
Ercles" is not popular with them, and they interest their 
audiences and act well simply because they do not seem 
to act at all. If the visitor to Paris wishes to see the 
perfection of classic acting, and listen to the purest 
pronunciation of French, he should go to the Comedie 
Fran^aise ; if fond of show, and tinsel, and glitter, and 
the sight of bewitching young ladies whose dresses 
were either " begun too late, or left off too early," to 
the Chatelei or the Porte St. Martin ; if willing to listen 
to pieces rather latitudinarian in their character for 
the sake of the most perfect comic acting in the 
world, to the Palais Royal or the Varietes ; if disposed 
to the "blood and thunder" drama, considerably soft- 
ened down from the style in which he sees it on the 
other side of the Atlantic, to the Amhigu or the Gaiete. 



CHAPTEE XV. 

DISTINGUISHED NEGROES. 

Confused Ideas of America. — One of my Countrymen. — No Prejudice 
against Color. 

XN Europe, every body from our side of the ocean — 
be he from the United States, Canada, Cuba, Mex- 
ico, Brazil, or Patagonia — is called an." American;" 
and unlearned people, as a rule, make little or no dis- 
tinction in the nationality of the citizens of these va- 
rious countries. This, perhaps, is no more strange 
than the lack of knowledge shown by many of our 
countrymen in regard to the divisions of Europe, and 
especially of Germany. 

I have often had gentlemen from Peru, Mexico, and 
Cuba introduced to me as my "countrymen" by per- 
sons of education even, and I once walked five miles 
to see a man in Italy, whom I was told was an Amer- 
ican who would be glad to see a "fellow-citizen," 
upon arriving at whose villa, I found to be a Brazil- 
ian, of a color which, I am afraid, would keep him out 
of " society " in the United States. 

Being black does not, however, affect a man's char- 



DISTINGUISHED NEGEOES. 237 

acter or chances of success in Paris, where there is not 
the slightest prejudice against color, and where a ne- 
gro is received and treated in the same way as a white 
man of his rank, education, and wealth would be. At 
the schools and colleges white and black children sit 
side by side ; and in marching through the streets, on 
their way to exercise in the gardens, a white and 
black boy are often seen arm in arm. There are no 
"negro pews" in the churches; at balls and parties, 
public and private, persons of color mingle indiscrim- 
inately with whites ; and at the Imperial balls at the 
Tuileries it excited not the slightest remark to see a 
"black Eepublican" from Hayti whirling through 
the labyrinth of the waltz with a blue-eyed, fair-haired 
daughter of France. Indeed, it is no unusual thing in 
the streets of Paris to see negroes riding in their own 
carriages, driven and attended by white servants in 
livery. I was once not a little amused, when present 
at the formal ceremony of the opening of the Senate, 
at seeing in the diplomatic box the minister from 
Hayti, about whose color there could be no question, 
and who, as the master of ceremonies doubtless sup- 
posed, with singular appropriateness, was placed by 
the side of our Secretary of Legation, then acting as 
minister. The latter was a gentleman from South 
Carolina, who could not have been particularly de- 
lighted at the proximity of his colleague. As our 



238 AN AMEKICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

Government had not then " recognized " that of Hayti, 
our representative did not appear disposed to recog- 
nize his brother diplomat. 

Some of the most celebrated men in France, in the 
ranks of literature and art, some of the most polished 
and gayest cavaliers have been, and some of the prin- 
ciple celebrities of the present day are, negroes. 
Glancing back to the last century, we find among the 
brilliant throng which surrounded the court of Louis 
the Sixteenth at Versailles, St. George de Boulogne, 
a native of Guadaloupe, a writer of elegant verses, in 
person a model of manly beauty, and in manner one 
of the most polished of courtiers. The chronicles of 
the time represented him as one of the favored lovers 
of Marie Antoinette, and he it was that carved with 
his skates upon the basin of Neptune at Yersailles 
pretty sonnets, inscribed to the ladies of the chateau. 
Under the Eepublic he became a Colonel of Hussars, 
and was celebrated for his bravery and address. 

General Dumas, the father of the popular roman- 
cer of the present day, was a native of the then 
French colony of St. Domingo, a general-in-chief of, 
the armies of the Eepublic in 1794, and the intimate 
friend of Hoche, Kleber, and Marceau. The mother 
of Dumas was a full-blooded negress. His name is 
inscribed among those of the brave men chiselled in 
the imperishable marble of the Arc de Triomphe, and 



DISTINGUISHED NEGROES. 239 

he was considered one of the most daring and devoted 
generals of the Eepublic. Upon the accession of Na- 
poleon to the Imperial throne of France, Greneral Du- 
mas, who had followed him in Egypt, might, had he 
chosen to have resigned his principles, have become a 
duke and a marshal. 

Julian Eaymond of St. Domingo, a deputy to the 
National Assembly of 1789, distinguished himself in 
that body and left a number of works upon political 
subjects. Lethiers of Gruadaloupe, was an eminent 
painter of the Imperial epoch, and a Member of the 
Institute of France. Lethiers, under the first Empire, 
when the mustache was monopolized by military men, 
persisted in wearing his, although a civilian. For this 
audacity, because such it was considered in those 
days, he was led into several duels with military offi- 
cers, from which, however, he always came off victor. 
He was sent to Eome as Director of the French Acad- 
emy of Fine Arts, by Napoleon, who imagined that 
to be the only mode of putting an end to these con- 
tinued quarrels. Several paintings of Lethiers are to 
be seen in the galleries of the Louvre. 

Bissette, a native of Martinique, at first marked for 
the axe of the executioner, was condemned to impris- 
onment at hard labor in 1825, for having received 
from France a pamphlet in which the political rights 
of people of color were demanded. By active energy 



240 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

and influence this sentence was reversed, and Bissette 
came to Paris, where he was regarded as a martyr, and 
soon became the intimate friend of General Lafayette 
and B njamin Constant. In the Kevolution of 1830 
Bissette took an active part, for which he received 
from Louis Philippe the Cross of July, and was made 
an officer in the National Guard of Paris. He then 
founded a journal called the Revue des Colonies^ the 
principal object of which was to bring about the abo- 
lition of slavery, and he was still demanding this with 
extraordinary perseverance, skill, and vigor, when the 
Eevolution of 1848 gave liberty to the slaves of the 
colonies of France. In the Constituent Assembly he 
sat as deputy from Martinique, and upon the fall of 
the Eepublic was created a chevalier of the Legion of 
Honor by the present Emperor. 

At the head of the men of color, at the present day 
celebrated in France, is Alexander Dumas. He is 
himself a native of France, and the son of the cele- 
brated general. Among literary men who are either 
negroes or mulattoes are, also, Eugene Chapns, a na- 
tive of Guadaloupe, a pleasing and refined writer, at 
present the principal editor of the journal Le Sport 
Fmngais; M.Felicien Mallefille, a romancer and dram- 
atist, author of the Memoires de Don Juan^ Les Sept 
Enfants de Lara^ and a comedy entitled Le Coeur et la 
Dot, which since 1858 has held a position upon the 



DISTINGUISHED NEGKOES. 241 

boards of the Comedie Frangaise ; M. Auguste Lacaus- 
sade, a distinguished poet, chevalier of the Legion of 
Honor, and principal editor of the Revue Europeenne ; 
M. Victor Sejour, a native of New Orleans, a dramat- 
ic author of considerable celebrity, and an officer of 
the Legion of Honor ; M. Melvil Bloncourt, a most 
agreeable, pleasing writer, whose articles appear in the 
Courrier du Dimanche^ the Siecle^ and the Journal des 
Economistes^ in which he has recently published a re- 
markable article upon Hayti. The' founder of the 
Journal des Ecoles^ M. Bloncourt, while still a student, 
defended the cause of the enfranchised slaves against 
the colonial reaction. M. Bloncourt has recently writ- 
ten for the Biographie Universelle^ the lives of celebra- 
ted men of color in all countries. 

M. Alexander Dumas (the younger), author of the 
celebrated Dame aux Camelias^ Diane de Lys^ etc., bears 
evident marks of his origin and race. M. Caraby, of 
New Orleans, is one of the most brilliant advocates of 
the bar of Paris. M. White, of Cuba, the son of a ne- 
gress, received the first prize as a violinist from the 
Conservatoire de Musique in 1856. M. de la Nux, also 
the possessor of a first prize from the Conservatoire^ is 
a pianist of great skill and celebrity. 

In the French army, at this time, are several men 
of color, among them M. Yirgile, an eleve of the Ecok 
PolytecJmique^ Colonel of Artillery, and chevalier of 

11 



242 AN AMEEICAN JOUKNALIST IN EUROPE. 

the Legion of Honor ; M. Lazare de Lance, Captain 
of Cuirassiers ; M. Guillot Eoux, Captain of Zouaves ; 
M. Bouscaren, Lieutenant in the line; M. Beville, 
Lieutenant of Hussars, and M. Bores, Captain in the 
French Navy. The ecclesiastical profession also con- 
tains many men of color, some of them of celebrity ; 
and among these M. Alfred Labory, director of the 
Freres de la Doctrine Chretienne of Ploermel, and M. 
Lauglume, Missionary to Senegal. 




CHAPTER XVI. 

LEAENED INSTITUTIONS AND LECTURES. 

Distinguished Lecturers. — Opportunities for the Gratification of all 
Tastes. — Programme of the Courses. 

THE Gloserie de Lilas is not the only " institution " 
to which the youtia of the Quariier Latin are at- 
tracted. It is in this quarter that the schools of law, 
medicine, science, and literature are situated, and dur- 
ing about six months in the year lectures are here 
given in the College of the Sorbonne, the College de 
France, the Ecole de Medecine, and the Ecole de 
I)roit. About four thousand students, the majority 
of whom are French, but whose number embraces 
natives of almost every country on the globe, regu- 
larly follow the courses with the purpose of obtain- 
ing diplomas and graduating in the branch of study 
which they have adopted. These lectures are, how- 
ever, free to all who choose to attend them, and the 
scientific and literary classes at the Sorbonne and the 
College de France are in particular much visited by 
strangers. In the lecture-rooms of the College de 
France seats are reserved for ladies. 



244 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

- With the exception of those at the " Conserva- 
toire," the lectures are all given in the daytime, and 
commence as early as eight o'clock in the morning. 
The lecturers are men of first-rate ability, professors 
celebrated in their " specialities," and among them are 
some whose names have obtained a world-wide repu- 
tation, such as St. Hilaire, Milne Edwards, Edouard 
Laboulaye, St. Marc Girardin, Becquerel, and Drs. 
Velpeau and ISTelaton. With a programme of the 
courses in his hand, the lover of literature, science, 
law, or medicine can find at any hour of the day the 
opportunity of listening to a lecture upon almost any 
subject from the " Immaculate Conception " down to 
the art of bread-making. The lover of literature and 
history can gratify his tastes to the "top of his bent" 
at the College de France. The spectator in the field 
of dogmatic theology, or in the more practical ones 
of chemistry, natural philosophy, zoology, anatomy, 
physiology, or mathematics, will find all these treated 
upon in the dingy amphitheatres of the Sorbonne. 

One of the most interesting courses of lectures has 
been that ' recently given at the "Conservatoire des 
Arts et Metiers," in the Eue St. Martin. These lec- 
tures being intended for workmen, are given on Sun- 
days, and in the evening, and are usually of a very 
practical description — generally devoted to the appli- 
cation of science to industrial pursuits. These are 



LEARNED INSTITUTIONS AND LECTURES. 245 

crowded every evening with laborers, who, having fin- 
ished their daily task, come here with their note-books, 
and carefully listen to and take down for future refer- 
ence sjach portions of the lectures as they think may 
be of particular service to them in their trades. The 
expenses of all these lectures, a programme of which 
for last winter is given below, are paid by the Govern- 
ment, and they may be attended " without money and 
without price." 

SORBONNE. 

FACULTY OF SCIENCES. 

Higher Algebra ; Astronomy ; Chemistry ; Calculations of 
Probabilities and Physical Mathematics ; Natural Philosophy, 
Experimental and Mechanical ; Zoology, A*natomy, and Com- 
parative Physiology; Higher Geopietry; Mineralogy; Differ- 
ential and Integral Calculus. 

FACULTY OF LETTERS AHD THEOLOGY. 

Moral Theology ; Philosophy ; French Eloquence ; Ancient 
History ; Foreign Literature ; Greek Literature ; the Sacred 
Writings ; Latin Poetry ; Modern History ; History of Philos- 
ophy ; the Hebrew Language ; Sacred Eloquence ; Ecclesiasti- 
cal History ; Geography ; French Poetry ; Ecclesiastical Law ; 
Latin Eloquence ; Ecclesiastical History ; Dogmatic Theology. 



FACULTY OF LAW. 

The Code Napoleon ; Criminal Law and Penal Legislation ; 
Civil Practice ; Roman Law ; French Law (studied in its feu- 
dal and common origin) ; the Commercial Code ; History of 
Roman and French Law; Political Economy; International 
Law. 



246 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 



FACULTY OF MEDICINE. 



Medical Pliilosopliy ; General Pathology and Therapeutics ; 
Anatomy; Medical Chemistry; Surgical Pathology; Opera- 
tions ; Histology ; Diseases of Children ; Mental and Nervous 
Diseases ; Ophthalmology ; Diseases of the Urinary Organs. 



SCHOOL OF PHARMACY. 



Physics ; Pharmacy ; Toxicology ; Natural History of Veg- 
etable Medicaments ; General Chemistry. 



COLLEGE DE FRANCE. 

Arab Language and Literature ; Mathematics ; Comparative 
Grammar ; Sclavonic Language and Literature ; Latin Poetry ; 
French Language and Literature in the Middle Ages ; Hebrew, 
Chaldaic, and Syriac Languages; Languages and Literature 
of Modern Europe; Chinese and Tartar; Mantchou Lan- 
guage and Literature; Epigraphy and Roman Antiquities; 
Greek and Latin Philosophy; Political Economy; General 
and Mathematical Natural Philosophy ; History of Medicine ; 
Organic Chemistry ; Comparative Embryogony ; the Turkish 
Language ; International Law ; Natural History of Inorganic 
Bodies ; General and Experimental Natural Philosophy ; Per- 
sian Language and Literature ; Egyptian Philosophy and Ar- 
chaeology ; Sanscrit Language and Literature ; Ethics ; Chemis- 
try (general study of salts) ; Greek Language and Literature ; 
Experimental Medicine; Latin Eloquence; Modern French 
Language and Literature ; Celestial Mechanics. 

SCHOOL OF MINES. 

Geology; Mineralogy; Palasontology. 

CONSERVATOIRE DES ARTS ET METIERS. 

Chemistry applied to Industry; Agricultural Chemistry; 
Natural Philosophy applied to the Arts ; Geometry applied to 
the Arts; Chemistry applied to the Arts; Industrial Legisla- 
tion ; Spinning and Weaving ; Descriptive Geometry ; Dyeing 



LEARNED INSTITUTIONS AND LECTURES. 247 

and Scouring of Cloths; Agriculture; Industrial Economy; 
Agricultural Works and Rural Engineering ; Industrial and 
Statistical Administration. 



SCHOOL OF LIVING ORIENTAL LANGUAGES. 

Course of Algerian Arabic ; Course of Hindostanee ; Course 
of Sanscrit ; Com^se of Thibetian ; Course of Modern Greek ; 
Course of Arabic ; Course of Japanese ; Course of Modern Chi- 
nese ; Course of Common Arabic ; Course of Persian ; Com'se 
of Malay and Javanese ; Course of Turkish. 

IMPERIAL MANUFACTORY OF THE GOBELINS. 

Chemistry applied" to Dyeing. 

MIJSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY. 

{Jardin des Plantes.) 

Zoology (articulated animals) ; Zoology (reptiles and fishes) 
Vegetable Physics ; Comparative Anatomy ; Palaeontology. 




CHAPTEE XVII. 



The Catacombs of Paris. — A Visit to them. — Dismal Places, — Miles 
of Skulls and Bones. — The Abode of the Dead. — An agreeable 
Situation. — Accidents. 

npHEEE are two cities in the latitude and longi- 
-■- tude which mark the site of Paris on t-his ter- 
restrial ball : the one on the surface above ground, 
with its broad boulevards and princely palaces, noble 
monuments and elegant mansions, and its gay, bus- 
tling life and beauty. The other is a subterranean, 
silent city of the dead, lying beneath the upper one, 
with its narrow, dank, and noisome avenues, cut 
through the solid rock, within which are moulder- 
ing to decay three millions of what were once the 
living, moving, trading, dancing, feasting, and merry- 
making denizens of the upper city. The population 
of = the subterranean is nearly double that of the su- 
perficial Paris. 

About one-tenth part of the total superficies of the 
French capital is undermined with the Catacombs. 
These excavations pass beneath the principal streets 
on the left bank of the Seine, in the Faubourgs St. 



249 

GrermaiDj St. Jacques, and San Marcel, and are in ex- 
tent about three millions of square yards. The Ob- 
servatory, the Pantheon, the Luxembourg and its gar- 
den, stand above the damp and sunless streets of the 
city of the dead below. The origin of these immense 
excavations dates back to a remote period. More 
than a thousand years ago they were made for the pur- 
pose of obtaining stone to build the houses of Paris. 
In the year 1784, some sinkings of the earth having 
occurred, a company of engineers was authorized to 
direct such works as were necessary for the safety of 
the streets and houses above, and, at the same time, 
the Council of State having issued a decree for clear- 
ing the Cemetery of the Innocents, which stood in the 
very heart of Paris, on the ground now occupied by 
the principal market, it was ordered that the remains 
found in this, as well as the other city cemeteries, 
should be deposited in these vast subterranean quar- 
ries. 

The works having been completed, the ceremony 
of the consecration of the Catecombs took place on 
the 7th of April, 1786, and on the same day the re- 
moval from the cemeteries was commenced. The 
work was always performed at night ; the bones were 
brought in funeral cars covered with a pall, followed 
by priests chanting the service for the dead, and upon 
reaching the Catacombs, were shot down a shaft into 

11^ 



250 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

them. When first deposited, they were piled up 
without any order or regularity, save that those from 
each cemetery were placed in separate heaps ; but in 
the year 1810 a regular system of arrangement was 
commenced. Openings were made for the admission 
of air, channels formed to carry off the water, steps 
constructed from the lower to the upper excavations, 
pillars erected to support the dangerous parts of the 
vaults, and the skulls and bones built up among the 
walls. Formerly, visitors obtained admission with 
but little difficulty; but several accidents having oc- 
curred, they were for a long time excluded, and at 
present only a limited number are permitted to go 
down once a year— about the first of October — when 
the Inspectoj'-general of the Quarries of the Seine, to 
whom applications must be made for tickets, makes 
his annual tour of inspection. 

Besides being the place of deposit for the remains 
from the cemeteries, the Catacombs are the burial- 
ground of those killed in the different revolutions; 
and now, every five years, the common graves in 
the three great cemeteries of P^re La Chaise, Mont- 
martre, and Mont Parnasse are dug up, and the re- 
mains of the unknown, unnamed poor removed to 
the Catacombs, to make room* for the crowding dead. 

My application to M. de Hennezel was followed 
by an immediate reply, inclosing a ticket for four 



"DOWN AMONG THE DEAD MEN." 251 

persons. There are some sixty entrances to tlie Cat- 
acombs, but the principal one is in the garden of the 
city custom-house, at the old Barriere dJEnfer — cer- 
tainly a very appropriate locality in which to con- 
struct the main descent to these lower regions. We 
were requested to assemble a little before four o'clock 
in the afternoon, and each one to be provided with 
a candle. I had taken the precaution not only to 
obey the letter of the advice, but also furnished my- 
self with a box of wax matches and a quantity of 
biscuit ; for such things have happened as people los- 
ing their light and way, and being left in these sub- 
terranean passages for a day or two, and taken out 
half famished. By four o'clock we were all assem- 
bled, about two hundred of us, among whom were at 
-least twenty ladies. The entrance is through a door- 
way at one end of the garden, and lighting our can- 
dles, the inspector having opened the passage, we 
commenced our descent, two officers standing at the 
door-way and carefully counting us as we passed 
them. The descent is by a spiral stone staircase of 
ninety steps, and measuring seventy feet. Having 
wound around them until we were giddy, those of us 
who had the misfortune to enter first being covered 
with grease from the dripping candles of those above, 
we found ourselves at the foot of the stairway in a 
tunnel about three feet wide, and but little more than 



252 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

six feet in height, and in which only two persons 
could walk abreast. We followed aloDg the narrow 
path, and soon it took a turn. At the corner was the 
name of the street cut in the stone, and the whole of 
this immense subterranean city is so laid out in streets, 
each turning having not only the name cut in the 
rock, but two arrows painted upon it — one pointing 
the way to the place where the bones are deposited, 
and -the other in the direction of the staircase. 

We were walking through a narrow passage, hewn 
in the solid rock. Eock above, rock below, and rock 
on either side. The walls were damp, and from the 
roof above, which our heads often touched, drops of 
water were percolating, and immense yawning fissures 
permitted it to pass sometimes in streams. The rough, 
uneven ceiling of this vanlt was in many places fill- 
ed with cracks ; and huge masses of stone, looking as 
if they needed but a touch to bring them down upon 
our heads and bury us all in a common ruin, we saw 
above us frequently during our passage. I was glad, 
afterward, that I had not examined the map of the 
Catacombs before going down and marked the great 
number of places where the roof has fallen in, or I 
might have been a little alarmed at this shaky-look- 
ing canopy; and I must confess it made me shiver 
once or twice to see a foolhardy individual just be- 
fore us continually picking off the little stalactites 



253 

whicli tlie oozing water, strongly impregnated with 
carbonate of lime, formed in icy pendants. 

Occasionally, on either side of the vault, was a 
dark, dismal -looking hole, into which putting our 
candles, we could see that it went down, down, down, 
into Cimmerian blackness; and from the main pas- 
sage-way, through which we were going, other pas- 
sages branched off in every direction. We must not 
venture into them, however ; we must follow the 
crowd, for a minute's absence from the candle-bear- 
ing throng might involve us in a labyrinthine maze, 
from which we might never extricate ourselves — too 
dark and too complicated even for wax matches and 
biscuit to get us out of. 

We turned a corner again : we were under the 
" Eoute d'Orleans," a broad boulevard a hundred or 
two feet above us. A little farther, and the guide- 
board informed that we were beneath the Sceaux Eail- 
way Station, about three hundred yards from where 
we entered. Now we were below the Kue d'Enfer, 
and then under a church, or some other public build- 
ing the name of which was cut in the wall. Some- 
times the tunnel widens, and in some places solid 
mason-work had been placed to prop up the falling, 
cracking ceiling. 

In this way we groped along for fifteen or twenty 
minutes until we came to the door of the Catacombs 



254 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

proper, the inclosure containing the human remains 
being but about one three-hundredth part of the en- 
tire extent of the quarries. The door is a heavy 
wooden one, over which is the inscription, ^^Has ultra 
metas requiescunt heatara sjpem spectantes ;'''' and as it 
creaked solemnly upon its massive hinges, we walk- 
ed in — in among the dead of centuries ! Good God ! 
what a sight ! We stepped from the doorway into a 
vestibule, wider considerably than the shafts through 
which we had come. On either side was a wall of 
human bones and skulls reaching nearly to the roof, 
here some ten feet in height. This wall is built of 
the femur and tibia (the thigh and shin bones), and 
three rows of skulls — the first, two feet from the 
ground, and the others about that distance apart, and 
this construction on either side of the vaults is main- 
tained throughout the whole. Behind and piled up 
even with it to the top, the smaller bones, which' this 
wall of skulls and .thighs and shins sustains, were 
thrown indiscriminately. The skulls were placed 
fronting each other, and, with the holes where the 
eyes had been, and the upper jaws, partly filled with 
teeth, all lighted up with the glare of our candles, 
grinned horribly at us ! Here, indeed, was a " cham- 
ber of horrors !" and all the attendant circumstances 
added to the intensity of the singular scene. We 
were a hundred feet beneath the surface of the earth. 



"DOWN AMONG THE DEAD MEN." 255 

A damp and charnel-like smell pervaded the air. 
The flickering candles threw a pale and ghost-like 
light upon the wall of human bones, and down in 
these vaults our voices sounded strangely. It cer- 
tainly would not be a pleasant place for a nervous, 
imaginative man to be left alone in without a light. 

But we were as yet only in the vestibule of these 
dark and silent chambers of the dead. Miles of walls 
of human bones were still to be passed through, ere 
we should see the fair face of Mother Earth and the 
clear light of day again. The crowd began to move, 
and I followed them. A little dark and dismal open- 
ing in the side attracted my curiosity. I turned into 
it for a moment, and, extending my candle, looked 
over the edge of a yawning abyss which went down 
into the earth, I know not how far, but the extent 
of which I came very near testing. The foul atmos- 
phere arising from it, or perhaps a little puff of wind 
extinguished my candle, and I stood on the verge 
of a subterranean gulf, among the dead, and in dark- 
ness. 

^ -Sf * 4f * 4f ^ 

Here would be an excellent place now to finish a 
chapter, after the fashion of those writers of sensa- 
tion stories who, when they have succeeded in sus- 
pending their heroes by the latter end of their nether 
garments to a nail in the top of a fence, yerj much 



256 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

to the disgust of their readers, suddenl}^ bring up with 
" to be continued " 

But I will not be so cruel, nor so regardless of my 
own comfort, as to long leave myself standing " by 
the light of a blown-out candle" down among the 
dead men. The situation for a few seconds was not 
a pleasant one. Psychologists assert that just before 
death, and particularly in cases of sudden death, the 
whole past is spread like a picture before the " mind's 
eye " of the dying man. Something akin to this, an 
indescribable sensation, as if in that moment I lived 
over again years long since gone into that past 
"where the shadows lie," I experienced for an in- 
stant, as I stood bewildered by the suddenness of the 
darkness and the strangeness of the situation. The 
past and present— friends living and dead — father, 
mother, sisters, and brother, and a pale-faced little girl 
I knew and loved in boyhood — all presented them- 
selves in that instant before me, but all confusedly 
mingled together. It did not continue long, however, 
probably not a tenth part of the time it has required 
to describe it ; for, bethinking me of mj prudent sup- 
ply of wax matches, I lighted one as quickly as pos- 
sible, and taking two or three steps backward, relight- 
ed my candle, and, without stopping to make any 
more solitary explorations, turned into the main ave- 
nue, where I had left the rest of the party, and to my 



''DOWN AMOXG THE DEAD MEN." 257 

great joy saw them, with their gleaming lights, halted 
only a few j^ards in advance. I joined them as quick- 
ly as possible, and determined not to leave them again 
during the rest of the excursion. 

Throughout the whole of these subterranean tombs 
the bones gathered from the different cemeteries are 
placed together, with a slab in the wall indicating 
whence they came — they having been taken from fif- 
teen or twenty different places. Besides these, every 
few feet are inscriptions such as these set into the wall 
of skulls and bones : 

"Za mort nous confotide tov^ sous un meme niveau; 
la distance des romges se perd dans le tombeau^^ — " Death 
sinks us all to the same level, and the differences of 
rank are lost in the tomb." 

How particularly true we can realize this to be 
here, where noble and beggar, priest and layman, old 
and young, are huddled together in a common pile. 
Here is a solemn appeal : 

" Yenez^ gens du monde^ dans ces demeures silencieuses^ 
et voire tranquilite sera frappe de la voix qui s^ellve de 
hur interieur^^^^^ Come, people of the world, into these 
silent retreats, and your tranquillity will be disturbed 
by the voice which comes up from them." 

''^Heureux celui qui a toujours devant ses yeux, Theure 
de sa mort'''' — "Happy is he who has ever before his 
eyes the hour of his death." 



258 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

In some places a number of skulls, arranged in the 
form of a cross, are set into the wall. Frequently we 
saw skulls through which bullets had passed, and 
others which had been trepanned, and particularly in 
the pile containing the bones of those who were killed 
in the various revolutions, we found many shattered 
ones. -One which occupies a prominent position, be- 
ing placed by itself on the top of the 'wall above all 
the rest, is celebrated for containing a complete and 
beautiful set of teeth. All are very brown, but ap- 
parently in a good state of preservation, and look- 
ing as though they might last yet for centuries, per- 
haps till the great day of resurrection, when they shall 
be revivified. And so we passed through about three 
miles of bones piled up on either side, stopping occa- 
sionally to read any inscriptions, and examine any 
that offered striking peculiarities. Several of my 
companions, who were medical students, although 
there were notices posted at frequent intervals re- 
questing visitors to touch nothing, could not resist the 
temptation to gather some specimen, and each one 
came up provided with a femur or tibia^ or at least a 
tooth. One young gentleman indeed, more enterpris- 
ing than the rest, "prigged" an entire skull. In the 
course of our walk we came to a well of pure water, 
which has now been inclosed with a wall, in which 
several gold-fish have been placed, and which live 



"DOWN AMO^^G THE DEAD MEN." 259 

there, but do not spawn. The spring, which was dis- 
covered by some workmen, was originally named the 
"Source d'Oubli," the "Spring of Forgetfulness ;" 
but it is now known as the " Fontaine de la Samari- 
taine," an inscription, the words of Christ to the Sa- 
maritan woman, having been placed upon it. 

After passing the fountain, we traversed half a 
mile more of these galleries, till we at length came to 
a circular stairway, which we began to ascend, and by 
which we emerged again into the clear, bright day- 
light, as we all supposed, at the same place at which 
we had descended. In this, however, we were mis- 
taken, for we found ourselves in a different portion of 
Paris, nearly a mile from where we had gone down, 
but glad enough to see sunshinCj and breathe fresh air, 
and get into the living, upper world again, after our 
exploration of more than an hour's duration among 
the dead. 

Before the Catacombs were appropriated to their 
present use, they were the haunts of thieves and rob- 
bers, who there deposited their booty, ^nd hid them- 
selves, when pursued by justice; and it is said that 
even now there are secret entrances, unknown to the 
police or to the engineers, which are made use of by 
felons for concealment. Several persons have been 
lost in these labyrinths and never found; and only a 
year since, two workmen, who descended for the pur- 



260 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

pose of making some repairs, had a narrow escape 
from an awful death. It seems they only took with 
them an open light, which was extinguished by a gust 
of wind, and, having no means of relighting their can- 
dle, they groped about in the darkness for nearly two 
days and nights — all night to them. When they had 
been down more than forty- hours, they gave "up all 
hope, and lay down exhausted and groaning. 

Fortunately they had groped their way, without 
knowing it, near to one of the ventilators in a street 
near the garden of the Luxembourg, at least two miles 
from where they entered. Some person passing by 
hearing a succession of low, stifled moans, went to the 
police station close at hand, and gave the information, 
when a party of men was. sent down, who rescued the 
poor workmen, then in an utter state of exhaustion 
and hopelessness, from a horrible death. I am in- 
clined to believe there will yet be some terrible acci- 
dent — a caving in of the streets and buildings above 
these passages; and with the general good care with 
which the French Government protects the lives of 
its su'h'ects, it is a little surprising that visitors are 
permitted to expose themselves by descending into 
the Catacombs merely to gratify their curiosity. 



CHAPTEE XVIIL 

THE CHIFFONNIERS OF PAEIS. 

Their Mode of Life, and what they find.— The " Hasard de la Four- 
chette." — Dilapidated Lorettes. — Objects found in the Streets and 
public Carriages. — Honesty of the Chiffonniers. — An independent 
Kag-picker. — The Eavageurs. 

IN most of the cities of the world, rag-picking, and 
the gathering up of such articles of small value as 
are thrown in the streets, is ^dernier resort^ and the 
occupation of beggars. In Paris it is an acknowl- 
edged "profession," recognized, and, to a certain ex- 
tent, encouraged by the municipal government. Its 
members, although not usually addicted to patchouli 
or eau de cologne^ nor models of elegance either in 
dress or manners, still manage to keep tolerably clean, 
and pride themselves upon their independent mode 
of life, which is under the control of no master but 
their appetites. They are a singular race, these noc- 
turnal Bohemians, forming a community of their 
own, and exhibiting a curious phase of life in this cu- 
rious city. 

In Paris, between dark and daylight, families are 
permitted to place the rubbish which has accumulated 



262 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

in the day's household labor in little piles in the 
street before the door, and these are gathered up in 
the morning by the rubbish carts after they have been 
raked by the cliiffonniers. About ten o'clock at night 
these nocturnal philosophers start upon their rounds, 
the utensils of labor of each being a willow basket, 
holding from one to two bushels, which is carried 
strapped to the back, a stick about a yard in length 
with a sharp hook at the end of it, and a lantern sus- 
pended by a piece of wire sufficiently long to permit its 
holder to carry the light close to the ground. I have 
often watched with interest the artistic manner in 
which one of these clievaliers extracts the valuables 
from a pile of dirt. The lantern is held in the left 
hand, while, with the hook in the right, the rubbish is 
scattered. No rag, however diminutive or dirty, no 
piece of bone, no cork, no bit of glass, not even a scrap 
of paper, escapes the sharp eye of the rag-picker. All 
is fish which comes to his net; and every thing in 
the heap which possesses the slightest value is taken 
up with the hook and thrown over his back into the 
basket ; then, carrying his lantern close to the ground 
in order that he may discover any stray valuables 
which may happen to be lying in the gutter, he starts 
off for another pile of dirt. After making their rounds 
at night, about one o'clock the cliiffonniers usually 
enter some of the low wine-shops in the neighborhood 



THE CHIFFONNIERS OF PARIS. 263 

of the market-houses, where thej drink the wretched 
stuff to which, in their energetic language, they have 
given the name of casse poitrine. Here they remain, 
catching a nap between drinks, until nearly daylight, 
when those who are not too drunk go their round 
again, reaching home about nine o'clock, after selling 
the product of their labor to the chiffonniers en gros. 

These wholesale rag-merchants have vast maga- 
zines in the quarters inhabited by the rag-pickers, and 
employ a large force of men and women to assort, 
divide, and place in separate piles articles of the same 
nature, and these people labor twelve hours a day for 
about thirty sous, in an atmosphere poisoned by the ex- 
halations of putrefying flesh, greasy rags, and cast-off 
clothing, compared to which the smell in a dissecting- 
room is like a puff of wind from the Spice Islands, or 
a breeze wafting on its wings the odors of Araby the 
blest. It is only the old and infirm, or those who for 
some other cause are disqualified for active duties, 
who adopt this profession of a trilleur^ as a means of 
livelihood, as all greatly prefer the more free and in- 
dependent life of the chiffonnier. 

Three-fifths of the chiffonniers are between seven- 
teen and thirty -five years of age ; and down in the 
narrow, dirty cellars of the Quartier Mouffetard^ and in 
the vicinity of the old Barrilre des Deux MouUns, where 
the sunshine never comes, and where the very air is 



264 AN AMEEICAN JOUENALIST IN EUKOPE. 

fetid with the exhalations of the pickings of the gut- 
ter, these people sleep huddled together, without dis- 
tinction of age or sex, in rooms where they pay three 
or four sous for lodging. A few elderly couples live 
together, and have a sort of house-keeping arrange- 
ment, but the majority eat in the wretched cook- 
shops, where for five sous they procure a meal, con- 
sisting of a plate of soup, and a stew of suspicious 
beef, or mutton, which perhaps never wore horns, 
and never gave up the ghost in "the regular way." 
In one of these places where the rag-pickers feed, a 
curious sort of lottery, called the hasard de la fourchette^ 
is carried on, which at the same time enables these 
people to gratify their appetite with tempting bits of 
food, and to woo the fickle goddess Fortune. The 
proprietor of this "institution" purchases daily, by 
the bucketful, from the cooks and waiters of restau- 
rants, the pieces which are left upon the plates of cus- 
tomers, and all these, jumbled together, are placed in 
a large iron pot filled up with water, and boiled into 
a savory soup. Each fellow desirous of trying his 
luck pays two sous, and then, seizing a long fork 
which reaches to the bottom of the kettle, is permit- 
ted to make one "stab in the dark"' — but only one; 
whatever he brings up from the abyss is his. It may 
be a delicate piece of chicken truffe^ a slice of beef, a 
bit of pate de foie gras ; it may be only a potato, and 



THE CHIFFONNIEES OF PARIS.' 266 

possibly nothing at all ; in any case, however, the 
diver is entitled to a dish of the soup, which, made 
from such a variety of meats and vegetables, ought 
certainly to be delicious. 

Among the articles gathered by the chiffonmers 
are the following, with the prices at which they are 
sold : old paper, torn and dirty, four francs the hun- 
dred pounds ; gros de Paris (sack and packing cloth), 
four francs the hundred; gros de campagne (cotton and 
colored rags), nine francs; gros hul (linen rags), coarse 
and dirty), ten francs ; hul (cleaner linen rags), thir- 
teen francs ; hlanc sale (clean cotton rags), seventeen 
francs ; hlanc fin (clean linen rags), twenty-two francs ; 
woollen rags, bones, old leather, broken glass, old iron, 
etc., are classified apart ; corks are usually exchanged 
for drink ; and the taste for smoking, in which both 
sexes indulge, is gratified from the ample store of ci- 
gar-stumps which the chiffonniers pick up in their per- 
grinations. It is said, indeed, that gentlemen who still 
retain sufficient confidence to permit them to purchase 
ready - made cigarettes, not unfrequently inhale the 
mild fragrance of second-hand cigars, which, having 
been thrown away by their original proprietors, after- 
ward form part of the contents of the chiffonnier'' s 
basket. 

There are in Paris about four hundred chiffonniers. 
Two hundred and seventy are males, and one hun- 
• 12 



266 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

dred and thirty females ; among tliem may be found 
persons of all ages, from children of both sexes nine 
and ten years old, up to old men and women of seven- 
ty. The community of chiffonniers is divided into 
two classes — first, those who have been brought up 
and educated in the business, who having a distaste 
for ordinary labor and a liking for an independent, care- 
less life, constitute its aristocracy, and feel a sort of 
pride in the fact that no member of their family for 
many generations has ever been obliged to "work 
for a living," and, secondly, men and women, some- 
times persons of education and refinement, who have 
seen better days, who, by their own imprudence or 
misfortunes, have descended in the social scale until 
they have reached the lowest round of the ladder. 
Indeed, it is said that there is now in Paris the son 
of a marquis whose vices and habits have finally led 
him to abandon name, family, and rank lor this 
wretched life. Many of the women are dilapidated 
"lorettes;" and an officer once pointed out to me, 
picking rags and bones from a pile of rubbish with 
the hook of the cliiffonnier^ a woman^ who, twenty 
years ago, was one of the leaders of the demi-monde^ 
who no doubt was then " gay in silks and laces," and 
had noble suitors wooing at her feet. It was difficult 
to detect a single trace of former beauty in those pre- 
maturely old and bloated features. But that disgust 



THE CHIFFONNIERS OF PARIS. 267 

ing wretch was nevertheless Adele P , who once 

made half Paris mad with her seductive beauty. Sic 
transit gloria mundi. 

Before a chiffonnier is permitted to enter upon the 
active duties of the "profession," he is required to 
obtain a hcense, for which he pays a small sum, 
and the fact* of having which he renders patent by 
wearing a brass medal upon his breast. ISTo person 
who has received a judicial condemnation can obtain 
a chiffonnier^ s license, and it is said that crimes, of a 
character which would subject its members to the 
penalty of the law, are almost unknown in this lowest 
order of industry. They are rarely brought before 
the judicial tribunals, and, indeed, as a class, have a 
very decided reputation for probity. In such an im= 
mense city as Paris, it may well be imagined that a 
great number of articles, of almost every description, 
are lost daily. According to the French law, the find- 
er of any such, if he keep them, renders himself liable 
to punishment for larceny. A person finding any ar- 
ticle of appreciable value is required to deposit it im- 
mediately with the Commissary of Pohce of his quar- 
ter, who gives him a receipt for it, and at the same 
time makes a register of his name and address. It is 
then taken to the Prefecture, where it is deposited 
with other articles of its kind, and where it awaits 
recognition and ownership for the term of a year and 



268 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

a day ; at the expiration of which period, the owner 
not having appeared, it is surrendered to the finder 
upon presentation of the receipt. Every week a list 
of the articles found and deposited is published in the 
Moniteur. The following is a list of one week's treas- 
ure trove "deposited at the Prefecture of Police : 

A silver soup-spoon, bearing two initials, one of which is 
L ; found at Clichy. 

Two bank-bills; found the 13th: one opera-glass, found on 
the 19th in a theatre, 

A gold watch ; found at Bercy on the 22d. 

A sum of 25 francs ; found on the 25th in the vicinity of the 
Chateau d'Eau. 

A porte-monnaie, containing 27 francs and 30 centimes ; 
found on the 26th in the Quartier du Val de Grace. 

A thread purse, containing 18 francs and 25 centimes, and a 
carriage number ; found the 27th. 

An old porte-monnaie, containing 20 francs 10 centimes, and 
a key ; found the 25th> 

A bunch of ten keys in a ring ; found the 25th near the 
Porte St. Martin. 

A barrel of brandy and a cask of wine. 

A gold wal ^h ; found the 25th in the Quartier Place Ven- 
dome ; a bunch c " seven keys, of which one is a watch-key. 

A piece of 2( 1 ancs ; found in a wine-merchant's. 

A gold watc > Tain ; found near the Bourse. 

A sleeve-butl u : found in the Quartier St. Georges. 

Two gold breastpins ; one enamelled, with pearls. 

A set of false teeth ! 

A packet of dirty linen, marked with two initials, one of 
which is G. 

A milliner-box, containing several bonnets and other objects. 

Forty francs, given by mistake at the door of a theatre. 

The chiffonniers^ whose business' takes them out 



THE CHIFFONNIERS OF PARIS. 269 

early and late, and whose lanterns are always carried 
near the ground, on which their gaze is bent, are of 
course more liable than any other class of men to pick 
up these lost objects, many of which are found in the 
heaps of rubbish thrown out in front of houses, and 
every day these roving philosophers may be seen 
coming to the offices of the Commissioners of Police, 
bringing silver spoons, watches, pocket-books, and 
other articles of value. 

A feeling of independence, and a decided objection 
to being considered mendicants, is joined with this 
probity. I proved this one evening soon after my ar- 
rival in Paris, when, strolling with a friend just after 
dark in the Eue St. Jacques, then swarming like a 
beehive with ouvriers and working-girls returning 
from their labor, I met a ragged Diogenes scattering 
with his hook a pile of rubbish. We paused to ad- 
mire the artistic manner in which he picked up every 
thing possessing the slightest value, and I asked him 
some questions. He informed me that he had a fam- 
ily, all of whom were engaged in the same occupation, 
and finished by inviting me to come and see him at 
his residence in the Cite Dore, near the Barriere des 
Deux Moulins. This man was evidently one of those 
who "had seen better days;" and feeling a natural pity 
for the misfortunes which had brought him to this 
pass, and willing to reward him for the information 



270 AN AMEKICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

he had given me, I offered him a ten-sou piece. I 
shall never forget the look of pride which shone 
through his dirty face and unkempt beard, as he drew 
himself up to his full height, and saying "I am not a 
beggar, sir!" marched off at a rapid pace. 

Besides the articles found upon the streets, many 
are left in the public carriages, and are returned by 
the drivers every week. Upon entering a cab in 
Paris, one receives from the driver a little card, con- 
taining bis rates of fare and the number of the vehicle. 
This, being kept, is a great check upon the driver in 
case he were inclined to be dishonest. The following 
is the list, appended to the one above, of objects found 
in the public carriages : 

Nineteen francs, change for a piece of 20 francs ; received 
for one franc the 26tli. 
An Italian medal. 

Nine francs fifty centimes ; received for 50 centimes. 
A porte-monnaie containing nearly 500 francs. 
Ten francs. 
A lady's brooch. 
A black opera-glass. 
A lorgnette, with a long chain. 
A basket containing 200 eggs. 
Seven opera-glasses. 
A lady's petticoat ! 
A valise, locked w^ith a key. 
A piece of 20 francs ; received for 1 franc. 

There is still a lower order of chiffonniers^ who, 
however, are not acknowledged as legitimate mem- 



THE CHIFFONNIERS OF PARIS. 271 

bers of the profession. These are miserable wretches, 
who never succeed in scraping together a sufficient 
amount of capital to purchase a hook and basket, but 
who carry on their baclcs an old dirty sack, and who 
pick up whatever the genuine chiffonniers leave — 
scraps of bread, decaying vegetables, and pieces of 
meat, from which they make a miserable meal. 

Still another independent artist is the ravageur. 
Formerly, when the streets of Paris had but one gut- 
ter running through the middle of them, these men 
did quite a thriving business in gathering up nails, 
and old pieces of iron and copper. Now their labors 
are confined to the river-banks when the water is low. 
The sewers all pour their dirty streams into the Seine, 
and bear along with them considerable quantities of 
old iron and lead, and occasional knives and forks 
and spoons, which settle on the bottom or are caught 
upon the banks. When the river falls, the ravageur 
spends his days in digging and gathering pans full of 
earth, which he washes for the debris which settles at 
the bottom. How he lives during high water it is 
difficult to say, unless it be that he spends the time in 
praying that the river may fall, and the banks be left 
dry. 




CHAPTEE XIX. 

VISIT TO THE CHAPEL OF THE TUILERIES. 

The Imperial Chapel. — The Emperor and Empress at their Devo- 
tions. — The Emperor. — The Empress. 

TTAYIKG frequently seen their Majesties at the 
-^-^ opera and at the theatre, and riding in the Bois 
de Boulogne, and once or twice dancing at the Grand 
Balls at the Tuileries, I had a curiosity to observe 
them at their devotions. Without much difficulty I 
procured a ticket for the Imperial Chapel for myself 
and three friends. The ticket, like every thing of 
that kind in Paris, was of a size which rendered its 
being pushed through the aperture of any ordinary 
pocket an impossibility. It was in the following 
terms : 

" Chapel du Palais des Tuileries, 

" Entree pour le Dimanclie de paques — Messe a midi. Mon- 
sieur . En frac." 

" (Signed) Le Gkand Chambellan, Due de Bassano." 

Some printed instructions accompanied the ticket, 
stating that " gentlemen would appear in dress-coats, 
and black pantaloons or knee-breeches." Having 
long since arrived at the conclusion that I was not 



VISIT TO THE CHAPEL OF THE TUILERTES. 273 

calculated to make an impression "in tights," I dress- 
ed in tlie ordinary full evening costume, and a little 
before eleven o'clock drove into the Place Caroussel, 
to the door of the ante-room of the chapel, which is 
the next toward the Eue de Eivoli, beyond the prin- 
cipal entrance to the Palace, beneath the Tour de 
VEorloge. In the ante-room there were already a 
number of persons waiting, and I was amused to ob- 
serve the utter disregard which had been paid to the 
instructions relative to costume. Of the whole num- 
ber, there were not more than a dozen gentlemen in 
"full dress;" some had black cravats, many dark 
gloves, not a few turn-over collars and scarfs, and one 
sturdy-looking individual, with a red face and burly 
person, was gorgeously, if not very appropriately, at- 
tired in a frock-coat, brown pantaloons, and sky-blue 
gloves. 

At eleven o'clock, an under -chamberlain, in a 
green dress-coat, and black velvet knee-breeches and 
sword, after collecting our tickets, • opened the door 
and ushered us into the chapel. This is small, and 
plainly constructed, capable of seating about two hun- 
dred persons. In the body of the chapel I noticed 
some twenty or thirty seats, covered with crimson 
velvet, and in front of these half a dozen velvet cush- 
ioned chairs, with a prie Dieu before each. A gallery 
supported by massive pillars occupied three sides, 

12^ 



274 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

while that part directly facing the altar was trimmed 
with crimson velvet studded with golden bees, the 
emblem of the Napoleonic dynasty. This was the 
state pew, where only the Emperor and Empress sat, 
and knelt at the performance of their weekly devo- 
tions. Over the altar, which was very simple, was a 
fine life-size painting of the Assumption, on the right 
an " Annunciation," and around the walls were sev- 
eral excellent religious pictures. As we entered, a 
servant of the palace, in livery, was engaged in light- 
ing the candles before the altar. Afterward he lit the 
candles in a dozen glass candelabras, suspended from 
the gallery ; and as it was a rainy and sombre day, 
this light produced a very pleasing effect. 

Fortunately, the seats in the body of the chapel 
were filled before we entered, so that we were obliged 
to take seats under one of the side galleries. These 
proved to be the best, as from them we could see 
their Majesties during the entire service, without 
turning round. At a little before twelve o'clock, an 
opening of doors and a rustling of silks were heard, 
and in a moment the ladies of the Court and the offi- 
cers of the Imperial household, entered and took their 
seats in one of the side galleries, first kneeling and 
making the sign of the cross. A few minutes more, 
and there was another banging of doors, and from the 
state pew above we heard announced, in a loud voice, 



VISIT TO THE CHAPEL OF THE TUILERIES. 275 

" L'Empereur." At the same moment the organ 
struck up, and the choir commenced the Kyrie EM- 
son. Every body rose, and all eyes were bent upon 
the Imperial pew. Their Majesties entered, and com- 
ing forward, knelt, crossed themselves, and opened 
their prayer-books. The Empress looked handsome, 
but very pale and sad. After she was seated, the 
high front of the pew almost hid her, and only her 
face, arms, hands, and bonnet could be seen. She was 
dressed in white, and wore a white bonnet fringed 
with swan-down, tied with a big bow of white rib- 
bon, and she wore lead-colored gloves. Just as she 
entered, she caught the eye of one of the ladies in the 
gallery on her left, to whom she smilingly nodded ; 
then turned to the Emperor and said something, at 
which he smiled, and then they both fell to their 
prayer-books. 

The Emperor was dressed in his military uniform 
of general-of-di vision, and wore white gloves. He 
looked exceedingly well, and his long, pointed mus- 
tache had evidently been handled that morning with 
more than ordinary care. He yet bore that grim, 
half-shy, unreadable expression of countenance for 
which he is noted. 

During the entire service, through most of which 
he knelt, he did not appear to be in a mood particu- 
larly devotional, and most of the time was engaged 



276 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

in turning over the leaves of his prayer-book, either 
trying to find " the place " or looking at the pictures. 
Often, as a sweet strain rose from a clear soprano 
voice singing the solos of the mass, he would look 
up, and bend his ear toward the singer as if listening 
with pleasure, and then his eyes were bent upon the 
Cardinal-archbishop and his two assistants. What 
could he have been thinking about, this grim Em- 
peror, with the sphinx-like countenance ? Might he 
not have been amused at the idea, that in spite of the 
implied and real abuse which he was continually re- 
ceiving from the dignitaries of the Church for having 
permitted their mother to be despoiled of some of her 
fairest domain, he had before him a cardinal and two 
bishops saying mass, and ready to utter the prayers 
of the Church in his behalf and to call down Heav- 
en's blessings on his head ? Was he indulging in a 
feeling of pride at the thought that the Head of the 
Church, to whose beautiful ritual he was listening, 
would, but for him and his soldiers, be an exile and 
a wanderer, instead of being seated comfortably in 
the chair of St. Peter? Might he be thinking how 
best to cut the Gordian knot, and solve the Eoman 
difficulty? Were his thoughts leading him back to 
the prison of Ham, and the land in which he had 
roamed an exile, or only to the days of the coup 
d'etat? Was he thinking of the battle-fields of Sol- 



VISIT TO THE CHAPEL OF THE TUILERIES. 277 

ferino, and the interview to which it led when he, the 
^parvenu, dictated terms of peace to the haughty scion 
of the haughty Hapsburgs? Might he not be stray- 
ing in the pleasant fields of earlier memories, and 
calling up again the happy hours of childhood, when, 
led by his mother's hand, he went to church, and 
listened to this same beautiful ritual more attentively 
than now? Whatever the grim and sphinx-faced 
man thought, he did not appear to pay particular at- 
tention to his prayers. 

The Empress, however, read her prayers attentive- 
ly and devotedly, her lips moving as she did so, and 
once she uttered the "Amen" audibly. Sometimes, 
as the solemn music rose and swelled, she would look 
up, her sweet, sad face lighted with an expression al- 
most angelic ; and sometimes she seemed for a mo- 
ment to forget herself, and would bend over and say 
something to the Emperor, who responded with one 
of his grim smiles, and then she would commence again 
devouring her prayer-book. The mass was magnifi- 
ently executed, the high parts being sung by a female 
voice, which is an unusual occurrence in the churches 
of Paris, where boys are employed for the treble and 
alto. As for the congregation, it was engaged most of 
the time in watching the countenances of the Emperor 
and Empress, and probably not a very large amount 
of religious edification or comfort was the result of 



278 AN AMERICAN JOURNi^LIST IN EUROPE. 

the ceremony to any of us. At the termination of 
the mass, the Cardinal-archbishop read the prayer for 
the Emperor, then, turning to the congregation, gave 
the Pax Vobiscum, then bowed to the altar, then turn- 
ing again, bowed to the Emperor, who, with the Em- 
press, rose and went out, and the religious services of 
the day, which had occupied a little more than half an 
hour, were over. An hour afterward their Majesties 
and the Prince Imperial were driving through the 
Champs Elysees, on their way to the Bois de Bou- 
logne. 




CHAPTEE XX. 

THE CEMETERY OF PERE LA CHAISE. 

A real " City of the Dead."— The Jewish Inclosure. — Tomb of Ra- 
chel. — Defacing Monuments. — Abelard and Heioise.— The Grave 
of Marshal Ney.— The Artist's Corner.— Vandael, the Flower-paint- 
er.— Singular Inscriptions. — The common Graves. — How the Dead 
are buried, and what it costs.— The Aristocracy and Democracy of 
Death. — "Poor little Hunchback. " — Respect for the Dead. ~ 
The "Jour des Morts." — Mortuary Statistics of Paris. 

THE Cemetery of P^re la Chaise is the principal 
of the three great burial-grounds in which those 
who die in Paris repose — the city of the dead, located 
on the brow of a hill in fearful proximity to Paris, 
and overlooking it. " City of the Dead !" No other 
cemetery ever seemed so well to deserve this title, for 
its grounds are laid out in paved and curbed streets 
and grass-plots and gravelled walks, and above most 
of the family vaults rise little chapels fifteen or twen- 
ty feet in height, piled in thickly as the buildings in 
a crowded city's street. From the tomb-crowned 
heights of the cemetery, one of the best views which 
can be obtained from the surrounding country is af- 
forded of Paris, which, with its towering monuments, 
arches, and domes, its streets filled with busy life. 



280 AN AMEEICAN JOUENALIST IN EUROPE. 

„ whence rises a low musical hum — the Seine, look- 
ing like a silver thread, running gracefully through it 
— lies stretched in the valley below. What a point 
from which to moralize — the city of the living, seen 
from the city of the dead ! A few years since, and 
those whose bones are now mouldering here were 
bustling through those busy streets yonder ; and a few 
years hence, how many thousands of those who make 
up the population of that gay and noisy Paris will 
be lying here in these silent halls. 

On the right of the main entrance to the cemetery 
is an inclosure set apart for the interment of Jews. 
At the other extremity is another for Mussulmans, and 
between them lie those who have had " Christian 
burial." Until within a few years past, still another 
piece of unconsecrated ground existed in which Prot- 
estants were interred, and it is only in the cemeteries 
of Paris even now that French Protestants are per- 
mitted to rest in soil hallowed by the rites of the 
Church. In the Jewish inclosure are the tombs of 
the Rothschilds and other celebrated families, but the 
one which attracts most attention is that of Rachel. 
A little stone chapel, with a grated door, rises above 
the grave, and over the entrance cut in the stone is 
the name "Rachel" — the only inscription upon the 
tomb of the great artist. In front of the chapel is a 
little flower-garden, and inside, and hanging about it, 



THE CEMETERY OF PERE LA CHAISE. 281 

are several wreaths of immortelles^ those pious offer- 
ings with which friends deck the graves of their loved 
ones, and which are annually renewed on the/owr des 
morts. Inside the chapel is a basket filled with visit- 
ing-cards, deposited by those who have come to the 
tomb. 

In this cemetery lie Abelard and Heloise. The 
unfortunate lovers are reunited now in a tomb taste- 
fully built from the ruins of the Paraclete, which 
Abelard founded, and of which Heloise was the first 
abbess. And here, at the grave of these models of 
earthly constancy and heavenly faith, of undying af- 
fection and holy self-sacrifice, despairing lovers and 
romantic maidens come and gaze and weep ; and on 
the jour des morts, whole cart-loads of immoi^telles are 
thrown over the ugly red railing, which prevents the 
too earnest admirers of the stricken pair from chip- 
ping off pieces of the tomb as mementoes. 

Close by the magnificent marble monument — the 
finest in the cemetery — erected over the remains of 
"Elizabeth, Countess de Demidoff nee Baroness de 
Strogonoff," is a little inclosure, surrounded by a low 
iron railing, inside of which is a small garden. Ivy 
creeps over and twines in among the iron rods and 
green grass, and freshly-sprung flowers cover the 
ground ; but there is no inscription, not even a knoll, 
to show there is a grave there; no sign by which a 



282 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

Stranger straying among these tombs would ever be 
led to imagine that within the little green space lay 
the man who received from Kapoleon himself the 
title of " the bravest of the brave." Yes : this is 
the grave of Marshal ISTey! A full-length statue 
of him has been erected by the Grovernment upon 
the spot where he was executed, and it is intended, 
I believe, ere long to place a monument above his 
grave. 

Near here is the grave of Beranger — the poet of 
the people — whose songs will live in their memories, 
and be transmitted to their posteritj^, as long as the 
language in which they were written lasts. The mon- 
uments of Massena, Marshal Davoust, and Greneral 
Foy are also in this vicinity, and just back of them 
the sarcophagi of Moli^re and La Fontaine, who lie 
next each other, as do Balzac and Souvestre, on the 
other side of the cemetery. 

Near the chapel, on the brow of a hill overlooking 
the whole ground, is a choice collection of tombs of 
some of the world's greatest artists — painters, authors, 
musicians, and actors. Among them are those of Bel- 
lini, Cherubini, and Boileau, Talma and Bernardin St. 
Pierre, the author of that sweetest, purest specimen 
of French literature, "Paul and Yirginia." In search- 
ing about one day for these, I stumbled accidentally 
upon the forlorn, neglected-looking grave of Jean 



THE CEMETERY OF PERE LA CHAISE. 283 

Frangois Yandael, an artist celebrated for his flower- 
painting, and who died in 1840. Upon the simple, 
humble headstone o'ergrown with moss, so that it was 
almost illegible, was this appeal to the passer-by : 

" Si tu viens au piintemps dans im lieu de douleurs, 
Ami des arts, tu dois le tribut d'une rose 
A ce tombeau modeste ou pour jamais repose 
La cendre de Vandael notre peintre des fleurs." 

"Lover of art, coming in the spring-time to this sad 
spot, thou owest the tribute of a rose to this modest 
tomb, .where repose the ashes of Yandael, our flower- 
painter." 

Notwithstanding this touching demand, Yandael's 
grave seems completely forsaken. It is covered with 
rankling weeds, and its decoration, the only sign of 
remembrance about it, is a worn and weather-beaten 
immortelle^ which looks as if it had stood the storms 
of at least a dozen winters. I had no rose to leave as 
a tribute, so I plucked a sadly-drooping wild flower, 
bending its head among the weeds growing on the 
painter's grave, and placed it as a memento among 
my souvenirs. 

The youth who, after reading the epitaphs of all 
the good and pious dead, implored his mother to tell 
him where the " wicked folks " were buried, would be 
as much at a loss in the cemetery of P^re la Chaise, 
as he was in the grave-3^ard of the country church. 



284 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST • IN EUROPE. 

If the inscriptions upon these tombstones may be be- 
lieved, nearly all who lie beneath their shadow were 
either the " best of husbands " or " wives," or the 
" most dutiful of children," the " kindest of parents," 
"truest of friends," or. of the "most excellent and 
benevolent dispositions." " Science " and " Eeligion 
weep," we are assured, unceasingly, over the memories 
of many of the dwellers in this city, and the grass 
upon the graves of others, we are told, is to be kept 
green by the tears of the survivors. Some of these 
tear-watered graves look sadly dry and neglected, 
moistened only by the Hand which causes the weep- 
ing clouds to descend "on the just and upon the 
unjust." 

Upon most of the tombstones is inscribed, " Pray 
for me ;" and in accordance with the Catholic belief 
in the utility of prayers in behalf of those who have 
passed, as Protestants think, beyond the state of pro- 
bation, friends, whenever they visit the tombs, kneel 
before them and send up to Heaven requests that the 
souls which once inhabited their inmates may rest in 
peace. There are some singular inscriptions to be 
found in the cemetery. One which always struck me 
as particularly ridiculous, and always brought up a 
smile, even among the graves, is that upon the tomb of 
an aeronaut: "Oh, Charles! the aerostatique science, 
which thou hast created, transported thy body above 



THE CEMETERY OF PERE LA CHAISE. 285 

the clouds, and the wisdom of Socrates raised thy 
soul above passion. Thou triedst thy flight toward 
heaven before quitting us forever." Upon the simple 
headstone of the grave of Comte, the author of the 
" System of Positive Philosophy," is inscribed only 
^^Auguste Comte et ses trois anges^^ — his three children 
being buried with him. Upon one bare and barren 
spot, which looks as though it might well be the last 
resting-place of one who left not a single friend to 
plant a flower or hang a wreath, is a headstone, on 
which is simply cut " Six feet of earth — forever." In 
one of the most public avenues is a tall shaft, sur- 
mounted by a torch, ^'Erected to the memory of 
Frederick Albert Windsor, the originator of. public 
gas-hghting;" and upon the tomb of a merchant near 
by it is stated that " he was an active man, and this 
is the first time he ever rested." It is in P^re la 
Chaise, also, that is to be found the original tribute to 
her dead husband of the " inconsolable widow who 
carries on the business at the old stand." 

What extremes meet upon this common ground ! 
Here are marshals and admirals and generals and 
dukes and counts and statesmen and orators, lying 
beneath the shadows- of lofty monuments, and here, 
next to them — almost jolting them — are the graves 
of the humble dead — the fosse commune — where the 
laboring poor, beggars who die in the streets, and un- 



286 AN AMEEICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

claimed unfortunates, who draw their last breath in 
the hospitals, are interred at the expense of the Gov- 
ernment; for as it interferes in all the affairs of life, 
so the Government controls the rites which follow 
death itself. 

The privilege of interring the dead of Paris is 
granted to an organized company, called the Entre- 
prise des Pompes Funebres^ which pays annually a large 
sum for the exclusive right. None but a representa- 
tive of this company may bury a body, and, with the 
exception of those of the Emperor and the Imperial 
family, every hody residing in Paris belongs of right, 
after the vital spark has fled, to this melancholy mo- 
nopoly. An agency is established in the mayor's 
office of each district, at which applications are made 
for the performance of the funeral rites. In answer 
to this, a blank is furnished, containing the items of 
expenses of the funeral of the class desired, for, in or- 
der to bring the privileges of death and burial within 
the means of all, the ceremonies are divided into nine 
different classes. The first of these complete, inclu- 
ding all the religious ceremonies, which themselves 
form an item of a thousand francs, costs 10,869 francs. 
For this class is provided a magnificent hearse mount- 
ed with silver, and nodding plumes of black, the hearse 
being drawn by six black horses, richly caparisoned in 
solemn livery of woe, and driven by men dressed in the 



THE CEMETERY OF PERE LA CHAISE. 287 

same sombre trappings. Thirty or forty carriages, all 
of which are covered with black cloth, are furnished ; 
the church at which the religious ceremonies are per- 
formed is gorgeously hung with black, and in its por- 
tal is suspended a black cloth, upon which, in silver 
thread, is wrought the initial letter of the deceased's 
name. The funeral service consists of a high mass ; 
the cure of the parish is himself present, with eight- 
een priests and two vicars (the cure's presence is 
charged in the bill at sixteen, each of the vicars at 
four, and each of the priests at three francs), and ev- 
ery thing is conducted in the most solemnly splendid 
manner. Descending in the scale, we find le'ss gaudy 
hearses, and fewer horses and carriages, and a smaller 
number of priests, and a low mass, until we reach the 
ninth class, or lowest-priced funeral, which costs but 
six francs and seventy-five centimes, and is conducted 
by four seedy-looking individuals, who bear to its last 
resting-place the body of the dead upon their shoul- 
ders. 

Throughout the different classes of funerals, the re- 
ligious ceremonies may be set down as from a tenth 
to a twentieth of the entire cost. A considerable por- 
tion of these, however, may be dispensed with ; and, 
with only the ordinary and necessary ones, the cost 
of the nine different classes of Parisian funerals is 
given on the following page : 



288 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

1st class . 7000 to 7200 francs. 

3d " ........ 3000 to 3300 " 

8d '' 1600 to 1700 " 

4tli " 750 to 800 " 

5tli " 800 to 350 " 

6th " . . ■ 100 to 150 " 

7th " 35 to 45 " 

8th " 18 to 20 " 

9th " . 6 to 7 '' 

The burials in the first four of these classes amount 
to only about a thousand a year, and produce to the 
company a revenue of 1,500,000 francs per annum. 
Those in the other classes, amounting to fourteen 
thousand, produce only about a million. 

For the fifth or medium class funeral, the following 

are the items for religious expenses; for this horrid 

bill of fare is always made up in true Parisian style, 

of an immense number of items, all set down with the 

greatest degree of particularity : 

Droit curiae (the fee of the cure of the parish) . . . Fr. 3.00 

Presence of one vicar 1.50 

" " three priests a 1.25 . 3.75 

Receiver of convoy 1.00 

Un enfant de choeur (a small chorister) ..... 50 

Sexton's fee ^ 75 

One cross-bearer (a boy belonging to the sacristy) . . 1.00 

Low mass . 1.50 

A priest to accompany the body to the grave . . . 8.00 

Small chorister 1.00 

Beadle 1.00 

Candles upon the altar 2.00 

Candles around the altar 2.00 

Total Fr. 27.00 



THE CEMETERY OF FERE LA CHAISE. 289 

There is no limit to the expense of funerals in Paris, 
as an additional number of carriages to any extent 
will be furnished by the company, and, on the other 
hand, the sum charged for each class complete may 
be materially reduced by diminishing the number of 
carriages, pall-bearers, priests, candles at the altar, 
etc. But it may be safely said that the expense of a 
decent funeral in Paris can not be less than five hun- 
dred francs. But the distinction of class which is car- 
ried through the funeral ceremonies does not cease, at 
the grave. Death here is no leveller, but an aristo- 
crat, who parcels out his victims according to the 
wealth they had, and divides men by impassable bar- 
riers even after they have been consigned to the bo- 
som of their common mother. 

In the great cemeteries of Paris are three classes 
of graves. The first consists of those sold in fee, and 
held by families forever. These " concessions a per- 
petuite " cost ^ve hundred francs. The second class 
consists of those conceded for a term of five years, at 
a cost of fifty francs ; and the third is the fosse com- 
mune, into which the "untitled poor are thrown like 
dogs in a ditch. Sixty;four per cent., or more than 
two-thirds of those who die in Paris, are thus buried 
in rough pine cofiins scarcely half an inch in thick- 
ness, and necessarily piled in so closely that they al- 
most touch each other. There-, the old man and the 

13 



290 AN" AMERICAN JOUENALIST IN EUROPE. 

infant, the courtesan and the virgin, are mingled ; and 
when the frail, thin boards which inclose the dead 
separate, as they soon do, under the combined action 
of the humidity and the mephitic gases generated by 
the decaying bodies, the sad remnants of mortality are 
confusedly mingled together. In that common grave, 
an eternal adieu must be bid by surviving friends to 
those whom they loved in life. Every five years the 
bones are dug up, to make way for others, and are 
removed to the Catacombs, those vast subterranean 
tombs where the dead of centuries are thrown into a 
common heap. If there should be a wall between the 
graves of the Christians and Jews and Mohammedans, 
why not one also to separate the tombs of the rich 
and great and noble and honored, from the huge pit 
into which the poor are thrown ? But perhaps it is 
better as it is — better that by these combining con- 
trasts one should be continually reminded that, not- 
withstanding the efforts of the Grovernment, the do- 
main of Death is a great democracy. 

" The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power, 

And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave, 
Await alike the inevitable hour : 

The path of glory leads bift to the grave." 

Some of the purest men in France have been in- 
terred in the fosse commune^ among them the cele- 
brated Abbe de la Mennais, who, for his eloquent out- 



THE CEMETEUr OF PEKE LA CHAISE. 291 

spoken words in defense of the rights of the pe(3ple, 
drew upon himself the disfavor of the Government 
and the Church, and who, dying, manifested his con- 
tinued sympathy with the poor by being, at his own 
request, buried with them in their common grave. It 
was this yawning gulf, too, that swallowed up the 
mortal remains of a poor little neighbor of mine over 
in the Quartier Latin. 

Pauvre petite hossue! This was the exclamation of 
my gaT(^on as he came into my chamber one morning, 
and then he pointed, in explanation, up to the attic 
window opposite, at which, until within the previous 
week, I had seen every morning, upon rising, a little 
hunchbacked girl stitching away as if for dear life, as 
it seems indeed it was. She had a mild blue eye, and 
a clear pale complexion, and a patient, but care-worn 
face, for one so young;, and seeing her always stitch- 
ing — stitching — stitching from the earliest morning 
hour till daylight had passed, patiently pulling through 
the seemingly never-ending thread, she had been for 
months a living example and reproach to me when 
I was disposed sometimes, as we all are sometimes, 
to grumble at my lot. But, like that of even the most 
■ miserable in the world, the life of the little hunchback 
was not wholly destitute of joy. She plied her needle 
twelve hours a day, and received but little for it ; but 
she had a canary-bird, which she would hang out at 



292 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

the'window when the midday sun threw a few rays 
into the high and dismal court-yard which formed the 
"prospect" from both our windows; and sometimes 
she would stop her stitching for a moment, and talk 
with her blithe little companion, who would whistle 
her his joyful recognition, and thanks for her atten- 
tion. Besides the bird, she had a pot of mignonnette^ 
which she used to water carefully. These and her 
never-ending sewing-work seemed to be her only 
companions ; and despite her feeble frame, and her 
pale face, and her deformity, which eifectually debar- 
red her from many of the pleasures of her sex and class 
in Paris, the little hossue seemed always happy with 
her canary and her mignonnette. They were " going to 
bury her," the gargon said, "and the neighbors were 
gathering to attend her funeral ;" and so I, who had 
not known her, except insomuch as her sweet-faced, 
sorrowful patience, and her earnest labor, and her care 
for her bird and mignonnette had made me love her, 
went down and joined the poor cortege which was 
gathering at the doorway, and, following it out to the 
Cemetery of Mont Parnasse, saw ihe jpauvre petite hossue 
laid in her humble grave. 

Eespect for the dead, or at least an outward exhi- 
bition of it, is carried to a greater extent in France than 
in any other Christian country. Whenever a funeral 
procession, whether it be of the first or the ninth class, 



THE CEMETERY OF FERE LA CHAISE. 293 

is going through the streets of Paris, every man and 
boy who passes or meets it reverently removes his 
hat as the hearse goes by him, and every woman ut- 
ters a pious ejaculation as she crosses herself. The 
same mark of respect is paid to the bodies while they 
are lying in the chapelle ardenie^ which is usually ex- 
temporized in the door-way of the houses in which 
the deceased have lived. In this wide passage-way, 
the coffin, shrouded in black if containing the remains 
of a male, or married female, and in white if those of 
a young girl, and surrounded by tall burning candles, 
is placed and permitted to remain for several hours 
on the day of the funeral. As the passers-by observe 
the insignia of death, they remove their hats, and in 
traversing the space rendered sacred by the presence 
of the angel who wears the wreath of amaranth, re- 
main uncovered. Many enter the door-way, and 
from a small urn containing holy water, resting on the 
foot of the cof&n, sprinkle it with a brush, making in 
doing so, the sign of the cross. 

One of the most noticeable peculiarities which al- 
ways strikes the eye of a stranger visiting the Parisian 
cemeteries, are the wreaths of immortelles hung upon 
most of the graves. These are made of the little 
flower which we call the "everlasting," and which 
grows in great profusion in the vicinity of Marseilles 
and of Toulon, and both sides of the streets leading to 



294 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

the cemeteries are lined with shops devoted to the sale 
of these memorials. An idea of the importance of 
this traffic may be formed from the fact, that about 
seven millions of francs' worth of immortelles are an- 
nually sold in Paris, and that on the Jour des Morts 
alone from six hundred thousand to a million of 
francs' worth are usually disposed of. The Jour des 
Morts^ is a day set apart in the service of the Catholic 
Church for the especial remembrance of the dead, and 
on this day, the friends and relatives of those who are 
lying in the cemeteries go to their graves, and renew 
these wreaths of immortelles^ and statuettes of the Vir- 
gin and Saviour, with which in Catholic countries the 
survivors love to deck the tombs of the departed, rob- 
bing them of that cold, barren, and desolate air which 
they are suffered to wear among those of a sterner 
religion. 'The friend, the father, the mother, brother, 
sister, or child of the deceased kneels before the tomb 
of the loved one lost, on that day, and offers a prayer 
for the rest of the soul of the departed, and deposits 
the annual offering. Those whose friends have been 
buried in the common grave, lay their tributes at the 
foot of a tall stone cross erected near the fosse com- 
mune^ and around which, on the Jour des Morts, these 
pious offerings are piled up to the height of several 
feet. Formerly, before the cold, realistic reasoning 
of the present age had destroyed so much of the beau- 



THE CEMETERY OF PEEE LA CHAISE. ■ 295 

tiful legendary faith of the past, it was believed that 
the portion of the night, from midnight to daylight, 
preceding the Jour des Morts, was a time when the 
dead were permitted to leave their graves, and revisit 
the scenes of their earthly life, and the friends and re- 
latives whom they had loved. Parents, who had lost 
their children, lovers, whose betrothed had been 
crowned with the bridal wreath of earth, all who had 
friends lying in the tomb, on this night sat by their 
firesides, leaving open a door or window at which 
the loved ones might enter. In some portions of 
France this faith is still retained. 

Besides Pere la Chaise, there are two other great 
cemeteries in Paris, those of Montmartre and Mont 
Parnasse. Of these, that of Montmartre is the more 
recherche, and contains the remains of more illustrious 
men and women of France who have recently died 
than either, or perhaps both the others. Poets and 
painters, romance-writers and journalists, musicians 
and actresses whose names are familiar to every lover 
of art and literature, lie buried in close companionship 
on the borders of the wide and shady avenues of Mont- 
martre. Among these are Mme. Emile de Girardin, 
the eccentric Henri Heine, Henri Murger, who has so 
charmingly depicted the student and Bohemian life in 
his '' Pays Latin" and " Scenes de la Yie de Boh^me," 
Tony Johannot, the caricaturist, Charles Fourier, Ha- 



296 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

levy, and Horace Yernet. The original of the "Dame 
aux Camelias," the loving and the sinning Marie Du- 
plessy, lies also in Montmartre, and her tomb, poor girl, 
is annually covered with wreaths o^ immortelles. 

The annual number of deaths in Paris is about 
41,000. Twenty -six thousand two hundred and forty, 
or sixty-four per cent, of these, are buried by the city 
at an expense of 157,440 francs. Of this number, the 
deaths in the hospitals furnish from 2500 to 3000. 




CHAPTER XXL 

EELIGIOUS FREEDOM IN FRANCE. 

The Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish Establishments.— The Parisian 
Catholic Churches.— The " Eglise cles Petits Peres. "-The Statue 
of St. Peter.— The "Ex Votos."— The Tableau of "Indulg- 
ences," 

THE free exercise of religion is guaranteed by the 
organic law of France, and the French Govern- 
ment supports and sustains alike the Catholic, Protest- 
ant, and Israelitish forms of worship. In the Catholic 
Church are eighty-one bishops, and seventeen arch- 
bishops, the Archbishop of Paris receiving a salary 
of 50,000 francs per annum, while the others have 
only 20,000. In the parish clergy are 178 vicars- 
general, receiving from 2500 to 4000 francs each ; 
3426 cures, who do most of the active duty, and who 
therefore receive the smallest pay, amounting to but 
from twelve to fifte enhundred francs each. Besides 
these, there are 80,243 assistants, who, according to 
age, receive from nine to twelve hundred francs; mak- 
ing a total for the expense of the Catholic worship in 
France of forty-seven millions of francs per annum. 
The native Protestants in France number about 
18" 



298 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

two millions. To supply tlie religious wants of these, 
eight hundred and fourteen places have been estab- 
lished, each with a pastor, receiving from 1500 to 
2000 francs, and two assistants, with 700 to 750 francs 
each; making a total of 1,493,436 fr. expended by the 
Government for the support of the Protestant form 
of worship. In the Jewish Church are ten grand 
rabbis, who receive from 3500 to 7000 francs per an- 
num, fifty-one rabbis, with from 800 to 1500, and six- 
ty-two ministers, with from 500 to 1000. 

In Paris there are several English churches both 
of the '' Establishment " and of Dissenters. Two 
American churches have also been organized within 
the past few years, and the congregations of both have 
erected elegant and comfortable houses of worship. 

There are no pews nor permanent seats in the Eo- 
man Catholic churches of Paris, but, instead of these, 
plain rush-bottomed chairs, before each one of which 
a prie dieu (a small chair to kneel upon) is placed. 
These, at all the services, whether mass, sermon, or 
vespers, are free to all who pay the sum of two or 
three sous, usually collected by women standing at 
the entrances. Those in the outer aisles are let at 
one and two sous, and those who can not afford the 
luxury of a seat, or are too economically inclined to 
disburse the requisite sum, can find plenty of stand- 
ing-room gratis. At first view, this direct, immedi- 



RELIGIOUS FREEDOM IN FRANCE. 299 

ats purchase of a seat, in a temple dedicated to the 
worship of God, seeras rather incongruous, and affects 
unpleasantly those who have been in the habit of 
walking, without let or hinderance, into their own 
pews. But then this system has its advantages. 
Any person possessing three sous is sure of a seat 
at church, if he go early enough, without being re- 
quired to depend upon "the gentlemanly and obli- 
ging sexton ;" nor is he liable to be frowned out of 
somebody's pew, in which he may have placed him- 
self by mistake, and from which he is requested to 
retire by a shower of eye-daggers looked at him by 
the legitimate occupant. 

• One's position on the floor of the church depends 
in no manner upon the quality of one's coat, the color 
of one's face, or the length of one's purse ; and in the 
grand old Cathedral of Notre Dame, and the churches 
of the Madelaine, St. Eustache, and St. Eoch may be 
seen on any Sunday, at mass or vespers, workmen, in 
their blue blouses, sitting side by side with men high 
in position and rank and wealth. The poor little 
ouvTiere^ who has been all the week plying her needle 
and sewing out her eyes in some dingy back garret 
of the Eue St. Jacques, is seated by the side of a 
countess with bejewelled fingers, and instead of being 
banished to the " negro pew," the woolly-headed Afri- 
can occupies a chair next to the gentleman decorated 



300 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

with the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor. All dif- 
ferences of rank and position are for the hour forgot- 
ten, or at least abandoned, and poor and rich, the beg- 
gar and the millionaire, the rag-picker and the mer- 
chant, the lady of rank and her servant, the working- 
girl and the duchess, all stand beneath these vaulted 
roofs equal before God, and God bathes them all alike 
with his gorgeous sunshine streaming through the 
stained rose windows of these splendid old churches. 

How far into the sacred aisles of St. Paul's or 
Westminister Abbey would a market-woman, or a 
rough sailor, in his woollen shirt, be permitted to. 
penetrate? And yet, in the Italian cities, it is by no 
means uncommon for the peasantry, on their way to 
the market-places, to stop a moment in one of the 
grand old edifices, and, setting down their burden on 
the broad pavement (for most of the churches in 
Italy are unencumbered even by chairs), kneel and 
offer up a hasty prayer. Might not Protestants learn 
a lesson from Catholics ? 

Strangers visiting Paris, and desirous of hearing 
the best church music, should attend high mass at St. 
Koch, St. Eustache, or the Madelaine. One of the 
most interesting religious ceremonies is the grand 
mass at the chapel of the Invalides^ performed every 
Sunday at noon. The music is that of a military 
band, and, during the mass, the old and disabled sol- 



RELIGIOUS FREEDOM IN FRANCE. 301 

diers, who are cared for in that noble institution, 
stand in the aisles with their heads uncovered, each 
bearing in his hand a lance surmounted with the 
French tri-color. Strangers will of course visit the 
Cathedral of ISTotre Dame, the Pantheon, and the 
light and delicately - ornamented Church of St. Eti- 
enne du Mont, which contains the tomb of St. Gene- 
vieve, the patron saint of Paris. They should also 
see the Church of Saint Germain des Pres^ one of the 
oldest ecclesiastical edifices in Paris, as well as the 
old but newly " restored " Church of St. Germain 
Auxerrois, from whose bell-tower sounded, three hun- 
dred years ago, the fatal signal for the massacre of 
St. Bartholomew. One of the most curious and in- 
teresting and peculiar churches in Paris, is that of 
Notre Dame des Victoires, commonly known as the 
Eglise des Petits Peres^ in the Place des Victoires. This 
church contains a large bronze statue of St. Peter, 
holding in his hand the keys of heaven, and this 
statue, or the prayers said before it, are supposed by 
the faithful to have a more than ordinary effect in ap- 
peasing divine wrath and propitiating divine favor. 
The devout, indeed, have given evidence of their 
faith here by kissing the bronze toes of the statue 
until they are worn to a golden color, and kept bright 
by the continually renewed embraces of the lips of 
kneeling penitents. The Eglise des Petits Peres^ which 



302 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

is dedicated to tlie Yirgin, has indeed a grand repu- 
tation, and the fashionable and unfashionable piety 
of Paris flocks to it at all hours of the day to say its 
prayers, and invoke the aid of the Yirgin and the 
Prince of Apostles. The interior of the church, in 
which service is held continually, is lined with little 
marble slabs, the ex votos, or freewill offerings and re- 
membrances of those who, having asked favors of the 
Yirgin in this temple, consecrated to her worship, 
have had their prayers, or at least are themselves 
satisfied that they have had their prayers answered. 
There are several hundred of these, all bearing in- 
scriptions, the most common of which is the follow- 
ing : "I prayed to Mary, and she answered my prayer." 
On some are inscribed '' Thanks to Mary ;" on others, 
"Ever grateful to Mary and Joseph ;" on one is cut, 
"Thanks to Mary and Joseph for the care of my 
daughter;" and upon another, " Grratitude to Mary 
and Joseph : by their interposition, the Widow 
Akerman and her two daughters were saved from 
the flames in the accident at Joigny, 1865," and the 
grateful " Widow Akerman and her daughters " have 
therefore placed this slab in the church. There are 
also special and extraordinary "indulgences" accord- 
ed to the faithful, who visit and say their prayers in 
this edifice, and these are set forth in a "tableau" 
which is suspended in the portal. 



CHAPTEE XXII. 

EOUEN AND ITS ROMANTIC REMINISCENCES, 

First Impressions. — The Rouen of To-day. — The Cathedral of Notre 
Dame. — St. Christopher and his History. — St. Ouen. — A curious 
Book. — William the Conqueror — " His Mark." — The Heart of 
Richard Coeur de Lion. — The Spot where Joan of Arc was burnt. 

T3 OUEN, the capital of ancient Normandy, and the 
jL\) former residence of the Norman dukes, is pic- 
turesquely located on the banks of the Seine, about 
midway between Havre and Paris. Its old, narrow, 
sidewalkless streets, on which front the gable-ends 
of the houses, swarm with busy life — for Eouen is 
a large manufacturing city, supplying France with 
a great portion of its cotton goods. Here William 
the Conqueror died, and Eichard of the Lion Heart 
was buried ; and here the last sad act in the life-dra- 
ma of the maiden of Domremy was consummated ; for 
here Joan of Arc was burnt alive in the market- 
place. With the exception of a row of new build- 
ings on the quay, which hide from view the queer- 
looking, slate-fronted, high-roofed houses, the old city 
of Eouen wears nearly the same aspect now that it 
did when William and Eichard rode proudly through 



304 AN AMERICAN JOUKNALIST IN EUROPE. 

itj and the gentle, lovely maiden was led along its 
streets to execution. 

The cathedral is one of the most wonderful speci- 
mens of ecclesiastical architecture in France. The 
delicate, lace-like tracery of its faQade and porches, 
much worn with time, is still surpassingly beautiful. 
Two towers, one of the 12th, and the other of the 
15th century, rise at the sides, and in the centre is a 
huge abomination in the form of a modern cast-iron 
spire four hundred and thirty-six feet high, and to 
which thirty feet are yet to be added. One of the 
old towers is called the " Tour de Beurre " (the But- 
ter Tower), it having been built with money paid for 
indulgences to eat butter during Lent. What an im- 
mense quantity of the article must have been con- 
sumed in its construction I There are some very cu- 
rious reliefs over the doors. One of these, a repre- 
sentation of the decapitation of St. John the Baptist, 
contains a figure of the daughter of Herodias, who is 
stated to have " danced " before the king. The young 
lady, however, instead of dancing, is in the ungrace- 
ful and highly unfeminine position of a tumbler, 
standing upon her hands, with her nether limbs 
thrown over her head, as though she were desirous of 
astonishing her beholders by the performance of that 
difficult gymnastic feat which boys call "bending the 
crab." All around and above the doors are headless 



ROUEN AND ITS ROMANTIC REMINISCENCES. 305 

statues of the saints and apostles. These were muti- 
lated by the Huguenots in 1562, who not only broke 
all the statues they could reach, but made fires within 
the buildings to burn the pulpit, organ and priestly 
robes. Much which the Huguenots spared the Ee^ 
publicans destroyed, for they converted the Cathedral 
into an armorer's shop, and the effect of these desecra- 
tions are still visible upon the blackened walls and 
pillars. 

It is almost impossible to convey any accurate idea 
of the vast proportions, and gorgeous appearance of 
the interior. The sunlight comes through Gothic and 
rose windows, and floods the stone floor with the col- 
ors of the rainbow. I saw it on Sunday morning 
during mass, when the pavement was covered with 
thousands of kneeling worshipers, their heads all 
lighted up with the golden and rosy glow which 
streamed through the windows. The organ was peal- 
ing out the Gloria in Excelsis^ and, to give additional 
effect, the huge bells in the tower were just then set 
to ringing. Mass over, I visited the monuments. In 
the floor of the choir, just in front of the high altar, 
four small lozenge-shaped tablets of marble let into 
the pavement mark the spots where the heart of 
Richard Coeur de Lion and the body of his brother 
Henry were interred. Their statues, much injured by 
the Huguenots in 1663, were removed, and lost until 



306 AN AMERICAN JOUENALIST IN EUEOPE. 

1838, when the effigy of Eichard, and his heart, shrank 
in size, but still perfect, and enveloped in green taf- 
feta, were dug up from under the altar. The statue 
now lies in one of the chapels, and although the nose 
is broken off, as well as one of the hands and a foot, 
there are still left appearances of that nobleness and 
courage which earned for him the title of the Lion 
Heart. There are other statues in the choir, and 
among them that of the Duke de Breze, Grand Senes- 
chal of Kormandy, and the husband of Diana of Poi- 
tiers, the beautiful mistress of two kings, who is rep- 
resented kneeling beside t"he body of her husband, 
weeping as if she " would not be comforted." 

There are some good pictures in the chapels, and 
one of St. Christopher bearing an infant on his shoul- 
der across a river particularly attracted my attention. 
How beautiful are some of those old legends of the 
Church, teaching lessons of endurance, hope, faith, and 
all religious virtues such as, alas, we seldom meet in 
the every-day walks of life, and in this faithless age. 
Christopher was a very strong man — almost a giant, 
and it was his ambition, to serve the mightiest and 
strongest king he could find, and so he transferred 
his services from monarch to monarch, always look- 
ing for a mightier one to wait upon. At length he 
heard of Christ, and that he, though -gentle, kind, and 
loving, tender as a mother to her infant, was more 



ROUEN AND ITS ROMANTIC REMINISCENCES. 807 

powerful than all the kings of earth. So Christopher 
said he would quit the service of the earthly mon- 
archSj and enter that of his Heavenly Master. He 
threw away his carnal weapons, and went into a con- 
vent. But Christopher was ignorant and clumsy, and 
only qualified for labor which required great strength 
and endurance, and the monks set him to the perform- 
ance of the hard work about the monastery. Among 
his other duties was that of carrying on his huge, 
broad back across a river the wood which the monks 
r.equired for use, and Christopher set himself cheer- 
fully at work performing this menial labor. But he 
was anxious always to see and have tangible evidence 
of the existence of the mighty monarch in whose 
ranks he was employed, and would question the 
monks often as to how he could be found ; and the 
good monks told him to wait and be patient and hope- 
ful, and he would yet stand in the very presence of 
his Divine Master. And so one day, upon the river- 
bank opposite the monastery, he found a fair-haired, 
rosy little child playing all alone, and Christopher 
took him in his arms, to carry him over for the 
monks to tend and care for — for he seemed lost and 
homeless — and in performing this charitable act Chris- 
topher knew that he was doing good service to his 
Heavenly King. He placed the infant on his shoul- 
ders, and waded into the stream, but, as he neared 



308 AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

the opposite bank, his burden began to grow heavier, 
and when he landed and set down his load, instead 
of a child, he saw a full-grown man, with a divine 
face, and a halo of glory all about his head ; and in 
the little child which he had carried across the river 
Christopher saw his Master, Saviour, God ! 

From the cathedral we went to the Church of St. 
Ouen, a magnificent specimen of medieval architec- 
ture, which also suffered terribly at the hands of the 
Huguenots. The interior of this is even more gor- 
geously beautiful than that of the cathedral. The 
walls seem to be of richly-stained glass, and the im- 
mense rose windows at either end throw a flood of 
variegated light up and down the nave. There are 
no monuments here, but there is a simple slab, mark- 
ing the burial-place of Alexander Berneval, the mas- 
ter-mason, who murdered his apprentice because the 
youth had surpassed him in the construction of one 
of the rose windows. Although the mason suffered 
the penalty of his crime, the monks, out of gratitude 
for his skill, interred his body in the church which 
he had contributed so much to ornament. 

In the public library adjoining the church is one 
of the most remarkable specimens of patient, earnest 
labor in existence. It is an immense book of parch- 
ment, about three feet long by two in width, on the 
leaves of which, a Benedictine monk, Daniel- d'Au- 



ROUEN" AND ITS ROMANTIC REMINISCENCES. 309 

bonne, wrote the words and music of a mass. Each 
page is adorned with beautifully illuminated vig- 
nettes, of * which the last one, on the last page, is par- 
ticularly striking, as well in boldness of conception 
as finish of execution. The subject is the " End of 
All." The dead in their shrouds are rising from their 
graves, the candles on the altar are burned to their 
sockets, an hour-glass is reversed, and Death, with his 
skeleton fingers, is writing " Finis " upon a tombstone. 
The whole work, which fills two hundred pages, was 
executed in the 15th century, and required the labor 
of the monk for thirty consecutive years. 

From here we went to the Museum of Antiquities, 
containing many curious Eoman remains gathered in 
Kormandy, among them a number of signet rings, 
with letters cut upon them to be used for pressing 
names in wax. The letters were reversed, as in ordi- 
nary type ; and it seems strange that although in this 
fhe Eomans stood upon the very threshold of the 
discovery, the art of printing should have remained 
unknown for a thousand years after. In this mu- 
seum are some charters granted by William the Con- 
queror and Eichard Coeur de Lion, with their signa- 
tures attached. That of the former, however, is only 
a huge, clumsy cross, such as a schoolboy, just emerg- 
ing from his "pot-hooks and hangers," would be apt 
to make; for although William could conquer the 



310 AN AMERICAN" JOURNALIST IN EUROPE. 

Saxons, and give a race of kings and laws to Eng- 
land, he never was able to overcome the obstacles 
which stood in the way of learning to 'write his 
name. 

Here, too, in a little glass box, is all that remains 
of the "lion heart" of Eichard — of the heart whose 
active pulsations inspired the bold Crusader to attempt 
the rescue of the Holy Land from the pollution of 
the Infidel. It resembled very much little crumbled 
pieces of sea-biscuit, and could easily be contained 
in a table-spoon. 

In the centre of the town, in a triangular space 
now called the "Place de la Pucelle," is a fount- 
ain, surmounted by a wretched statue of Jeanne 
d'Arc, who was burnt on this spot in the year 1431. 
Around it are quaint, old, slate-fronted houses; and 
from the windows of these, and from the roof of an 
old church standing on the corner (now converted 
into a livery stable) the vile rabble watched the 
smoke and flames curling around the form of the no- 
ble maiden, whose crime had been to save them and 
their country from the English. But that was more 
than four hundred years ago. 



THE END. 



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